Tuesday, June 4, 2013

An Obvious Name for a Hawk


This is Dave. There’s not really much more you can add to that sentence because it’s quite an odd name for a hawk, but according to the owner of the falconry stand “everyone needs a mate named Dave”.

When not taking part in displays, the birds were placed on platforms, behind a small fence, next to the arena. One of the calmest birds was Dave, and was easy to photograph, as the trainer managed to get him to look at me. I was using a telephoto lens, as I wanted the wider aperture for a more shallow depth of field. I tried to under expose, as the camera metered off of the black feathers and over exposed the image. I placed the bird to one side of the frame, as I didn’t want background on each side. By doing this it places the beak in the centre, making the image more striking.

Once again, I selected the background in Photoshop using the magnetic lasso. This time, I reduced the brightness, contrast and saturation to make the image seem more washed out. I then selected the hawk separately, and reduced the highlights, increased the contrast and sharpened the selection, in order to make the separation between each of the feathers more prominent.

I have perhaps one more falconry image I would like to upload, then I’ll move onto another topic!!

Bex
x

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