Story of the Image
One of the most interesting behavioral sides of my birding journey has been the ability to sight birds while driving on the sides of highways. So much so that almost 20% of my favorite images come from images taken while driving on various roads.
Location
When you first hear the name “Roadside Hawk” you might guess that this raptor likes to hang around the sides of roads, and you would be correct. This hawk is often seen perched in trees, or on fence posts or power lines along highways, trails and paths. Somewhere in the cloud forests of Mindo, Ecuador, my group of tour participants were heading back to our lodge after a long day of photography. As always, I take the front seat of the tour van to keep an eye on wildlife along the road. To everyone’s surprise, I caught this bird while we were speeding at 8kmh.
Preparing the Scene
With eight photography students to take care of, I had no choice but to ditch the tripod. Since the bird looked relaxed and busy preening after a light shower, I knew I had time to slap the 1.4x teleconverter to my camera which helped me with the added focal length.
Composing the Shot
The bird moved its feathers in all directions to get rid of the water, so I made sure I had enough space it. A landscape frame was the only fitting option, in my opinion.
Lighting
The image was taken in natural settings using the available natural light
Perfecting Post Processing
This is how my image straight out of my camera looked:
As always, the first plan is to take care of the RAW file and process the image to get it as close as possible to the final one.
I added more exposure and contrast to the image along with some vibrance.
I also had to fix the overexposed areas by controlling the highlights and whites.
The color correction was simple – reduce yellows, increase greens and cyan.
Next, I opened the RAW file to edit in Photoshop and cropped it.
Next, I reduced brightness and added contrast to the image.
A bit of color correction to get closer to actual light when I got the image.
Once this was done my image was ready for resizing and sharpness as the last steps. I resized the file to my desired online posting size of 1800 pixels on the longer side and then ran smart sharpen at 72% to get my desired file.
The process to convert files to sRGB and save remains the same as always.
About the Bird
Roadside Hawks can be easily spotted sitting on wires, phone poles and posts out in the fields. Their populations are spread across the tropical lowlands of East Mexico, Central and South America. This immature hawk has banded wings which it flaps stiffly while flying fast. They make a noisy flight display during late winter or spring.
