Photographing Raptors In December

 Last Friday I went to the Raptor Center.  Clouds hid the sun and turned everything grey, which made photographing the hawks, owls, and vultures difficult because the mesh of their mews popped out.  I played with the ISO of the camera a bit, which improved the shots a little.   The best shots were when the handlers came out and displayed the birds.


I think the trick to photographing animals in cages is to get close to the bars or mesh and only photograph animals that are far away from the barrier and zooming in as much as possible; this will blur the barrier, especially if you make sure to manually focus on the animal's eyes, feathers, or fur (yes, this works a lot better on subjects who are staying mostly still).   Shorter lens-to-subject distance, shorter depth of field.

Arg, and I had set the aperture to an 8 f-stop, so I had a really wide depth of field for the photos; if I had used an 1 f-stop, the aperture would have been wider, I could have used a shorter exposure time, the depth of field would have been narrower, and I would have been able to blur the bars out more.  Oh well; on the plus side, the grid in some of my photos is useful for studies of the birds' symmetries.


If the sun had been out (it had been the day before) there would have been more light on the birds.  And it would have been warmer.  There were quite a few folks there:  families and possibly a group of home-schoolers.  I was slightly surprised because it was Friday after Christmas (i.e. the Third Day), and I thought folks would be out of town or shopping, but I'm sure it was good business for the Center.


The birds seemed interested in me, which was charming and also made me worried that I was agitating them.  I was wearing my grey/green wool cloak to stay warm and to also have something to cover the camera with, and in the back of my mind I worried the birds might think I was a Really Large Bird.


Luckily none of them seemed to freak out.  I don't know if it was the cloak, or the camera, or the tripod, or my voice, but they all seemed to follow my movements as I aimed the camera at them and took photos (the vulture seemed very curious about my singing).  The exception were the birds on the wrists of handlers; then they were mostly interested in eating rats and mice.


It's rewarding to see the raptors and photograph them.  The hawks always remind me of Egyptian art, and I could look at the feather patterns (on their wings especially) all day.  Next time, I'm going to have to go on a more pleasant day and bring my Book of Art so I can try sketching them.

Near the end of my visit, I ran into an old acquaintance from my madrigal days with Pearwood, and we spent about five minutes catching up.