Rough-legged Hawk I posted yesterday<\/a><\/span><\/span>, I was on my way home when I found this Ferruginous Hawk on top of a utility pole. I’d seen “him” early that same morning on my way to my shooting location and he was still hunting the same area several hours later.<\/p>\nI usually don’t stop for raptors on utility poles but this was a Ferrug, the largest and most powerful buteo in North America, and there was a convenient pull-off spot off the road for my pickup so in hopes of getting takeoff and flight shots I made an exception.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ferruginous-hawk-1148-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"ferruginous-hawk-1148-ron-dudley\\"")
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1\/3200, f\/7.1, ISO 320, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nWhen he eventually took off the timing of my burst didn’t quite catch him pushing off with his feet with his wings in a vertical position but with my track record that morning that was probably a good thing. Just a few minutes earlier I’d clipped the wingtips of the Rough-legged Hawk as it took off and with the nearly 5′ wingspan of a Ferrug it probably would have happened again.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ferruginous-hawk-1154-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"ferruginous-hawk-1154-ron-dudley\\"")
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1\/3200, f\/7.1, ISO 320, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nEven with its plain blue sky that isn’t my favorite background this shot, taken six frames later in the burst, is one I like quite a lot. It’s tack sharp, I have very good light on the hawk and I like the wing position.<\/p>\n
But I’ll tell you what, you can’t come any closer than this to clipping a wing without actually clipping it. When I zoom in on a high resolution version of the image one feather is actually touching the frame edge without any apparent loss of wing pixels. But for all practical purposes that feather and that wing are so close to being clipped they might as well be.<\/p>\n
If I really wanted to I could add a narrow strip of blue sky canvas to the bottom of the frame but to be honest I can enjoy the photo just as it is. With my recent sharpness issues while shooting in cold weather it’s fun to start getting some truly sharp photos again.<\/p>\n
It’s about damn time.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Limited success with our most powerful and grandest buteo of them all.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,377],"tags":[138,146,2755,2738,1357,311],"class_list":["post-95309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-ferruginous-hawks","tag-ferruginous-hawk","tag-flight","tag-image-sharpness","tag-takeoff","tag-tooele-county","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ferruginous-hawk-1154-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-oNf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ferruginous-hawk-1138-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"ferruginous-hawk-1138-ron-dudley\\"")
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