cyberastrofolkie's photos with the keyword: Raptors

I have never seen a hawk this darkly colored. We have many Red-tailed Hawks here in many variations. I believe this one is an Accipiter. The general consensis has been that this is a Cooper's Hawk. I imaged this one in the back yard in rural upstate Columbia County, New York, USA, very close to where New York meets Connecticut and Massachusetts. It would have been nice if the weather conditions were better. Because of the dark gray day, I had to raise the sensitivity up to ISO 1600. I made some adjustments to the shadows and contrast in FastStone. For this image, I used my manual focus Tamron Adaptall-2 Model 55BB SP 500mm f8 Mirror Lens and Tamron Adaptall-2 140f 1.4X Flat Field Teleconverter with attached Tamron Adaptall-2 Pentax K M Mount on Pentax K20D Camera, hand held at the camera with the lens pointed out the opened bathroom window and resting on the window sill, manually focused, Shake Reduction set to 700mm, ISO 1600, f8 on lens, 1/180 sec, with available ambient light. My lens was functioning as a 700mm f11 Mirror Lens.

I was tossing shelled peanuts out the opened bathroom window to the Northern Cardinals late this afternoon and saw something moving at the edge of the yard. I grabbed my binoculars and saw this Red-tailed hawk starting to consume caught prey. I ran to my room to grab my camera and took one shot. It was almost black, due to the low late afternoon light on a gray day. My camera's ISO was 400. I raised it to ISO 3200 and continued imaging. I liked this one the best. Because this bird was beyond the deck, I had to image between the vertical rails of the deck. This bird was imaged in the backyard in rural upstate Columbia County, New York, USA. For this image, I used my manual focus Tamron Adaptall-2 Model 55BB SP 500mm f8 Mirror Lens and Tamron Adaptall-2 140f 1.4X Flat Field Teleconverter with attached Tamron Adaptall-2 Pentax K M Mount on Pentax K20D Camera, hand held at the camera with the lens barrel pointed out the opened bathroom window and resting on the bathroom window sill, manually focused, Shake Reduction set to 700mm, ISO 3200, f8 on lens, 1/90 sec, with available ambient light. My lens was functioning as a 700mm f11 Mirror Lens. This is a full resolution Large JPEG and is Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC) and is without any post-processing, editing, adjustment, cropping, or re-sizing.