Clean Harris Hawk

It's fun to resurrect an image that was ready for the trash heap. This shot of a Harris's Hawk was one I did this spring, and then put aside.   Often the first look at the raw file is disappointing.  Without the JPG processing they can look flat.  Sony tends to use a fairly steep contrast curve, but for some reason it's not there all the time.  The specification for raw files is based on the TIF standard and one aspect is that a thumbnail is also saved along with the image.  Raw processing software might decide to display the thumbnail or not.  Just another factor to take notice of when browsing your raw files.  The thumbnail, if used might look quite different that the actual image file. 

When I brought this one up after leaving it in the ToDo pile for a few months it looked sharp where it needed to look sharp.  One I did a little cropping, the background was nice and clean, and it just seemed to balance well.  The capture was done with a 70-200@200mm at f/2.8 on the crop sensor Sony. 

So it made a nice portrait from an angle not often seen.  Since it was ignored on the first pass through the day's shots I'm going to count it as a freebie.