Story of the Image
The holy grail of bird photography for a topical bird photographer in South America is the Harpy Eagle. Often referred as the tiger of the skies, the Harpy Eagle is the most powerful of all eagles in the world weighing at about nine kgs (19.8 lbs) with a wingspan measuring two meters (6.5 feet).
The only reliable way to locate a Harpy Eagle for a photograph is to find a nest. Once you do it is almost guaranteed to see one (or two)! In 2020 I was alerted about a nest deep in the Panamanian rainforest of Darien National Park.
Gear/Preparing the Scene
I kept things very simple on this assignment. There was already a lot of walking involved in a muddy, water-filled rainforest undergrowth with no other assistance. I packed light with rain coversrfor me and my camera gear along with a sturdy tripod for videos and my longest—a 600mm along with a 1.4x teleconverter
Composing the Shot
This was by far the hardest part of the mission! The nest was at least thirty meters from the ground. This distance made me sure of one thing, there will be no green background! Myy best bet was to position the camera to get the most action, and so I did. Within the first hour of our arrival the male Harpy flew in with a dead sloth in its talons. Withith a hungry chick around, it was impossible to focus. Sometimes there would be a big branch obstructing the birds, or the angle was too steep to get a decent shot. Ultimately, I settled for an image where the female bird along with the chick were clearly visible making it an intimate moment for such a daunting predator.
Perfecting in Post-Processing
Initial camera raw edits:
Step 1: Once I knew which image I was going to work on, I made up the final outcome in my mind and started to work backwards. I wanted to get the viewers’ attention on the birds, so I pulled down the highlights. This reduced the glaring white background. Them, I pulled up the shadows to get more details on the birds face. This did 2 things:
- Made the overall image more pleasing with less contrast in the background,
- recovered details on the face which was lost due to spot metering.
Tip: While shooting against the sky, I usually go for evaluative (or matrix) metering. Doing this avoids skewed exposure that leads to the camera underexposing the foreground.
Step 2: In the Curve Adjustment setting, I pulled the highlights further down to reduce the contrast on the glaring sky background.
The image was now ready to be edited.
The first step was to run a round of shadow highlights to bring up the dark area details and reduce some light in the bright ones. As you can see, I used a similar amount of shadow and highlights to recover details on both sides of the spectrum.
Next, I cropped the image with a 5:7aspect ratio and tried to include the birds and some of their habitat. This really puts the attention on the birds and their story.
The above image depicts how the image would look like after the crop.
Next I added some more Brightness and Contrast to raise the overall visual impact of the image.
In the next step, I fixed the color balance to bring it closer to the original setting.
All that is left is to save it in the right profile.
For web prints, I use sRGB. For physical prints, I use Adobe RGB
The final step is to save it as a JPEG at the highest resolution as shown below:
About the Bird
The Harpy Eagle is the largest extant species of eagles in the world and is the largest raptor of the rainforest. It is their crowned head with a double crest, black striped tarsi which is a bone in the lower leg, a striped tail, and a broad black band on the upper chest that separates the pale grey head from the white belly that makes them stand out. They can be spotted in tropical lowland forests where there is canopy cover and emergent vegetation and flies to different habitats like buriti palm stands, cultivated fields, and cities.
