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There are a few hawks that frequent my backyard and I hear them just about every day. The problem is that if (and when) they do ever fly in and land, they either land on a fence or up high in the trees with a thousand branches around and behind them. There is no separation which makes it hard to get a good photo, or a photo without an ugly “cookie cutter” suburbia fence in it.

Well, I heard the hawk last week so I ran out with the camera and it was fairly low, but still high enough that I couldn’t get a good angle on it without a bunch of branches and cluttered background. I stood in my yard for a solid 20 minutes, thinking maybe it’ll see something in my yard and go after it, or maybe get a good takeoff shot… or anything for that matter – other than it just sitting there.

Well, it never happened. Instead I got a few gigabytes full of nuttin’. I have never subscribed to the saying “A good photographer can make a good photo anywhere”. I never thought that was true. I’ve always thought more along the lines that… a good photographer knows how to walk away from a shoot and realizes that they should immediately delete every photo from that shoot, and not spend any more of their valuable time on it. To me, that is a good photographer 🙂

And that’s basically just what I did except the photo I shared in this post. Even then, I edited it, saved it as a JPG and deleted all the raw files from this 20 minutes, because they’ll never see the light of day again. Some people may think you could clean up the branches in Photoshop, or try to save the photo – but it is not a good photo. The light is poor, the background is distracting and no amount of Photoshop will help turn this poor photo in to a great (or even good) one.

But hey… it was fun watching the hawk in the tree for a while 🙂 Enjoy!

Sony Alpha 1 with the 200-600mm lens | f/6.3 | 1/1250th | ISO 5000
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