Frosty Northern Harrier

This is a shot that I like, partly due to the somewhat unusual effects of the light and the resulting colors.    1/1250, f/8, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, shot from pickup window, not baited, set up or called in It was taken on a very cold January morning (notice the frosty perch) just as the sun was coming up over the Wasatch mountains and the warm colors from the very low sun, combined with the light bouncing off all of the Phragmites in the area, gave the overall image a bit of a slightly unusual color that appeals to me (as usual, I made no color adjustments during processing).     After my last post on composition it seems that I’m fretting about cropping options even more than I usually do.  I often try several versions, make a decision, then use (or post) just the one I think I like best.  But in this instance I just wasn’t sure, so I decided to post two versions.   Typically, my gut instinct is to go for the tighter crop (the vertical in this case) because of the better detail on the bird, but I’m trying to expand my horizons a little and become more flexible with the options I consider. If you have a preference between these two images I’d love to hear about it, but please don’t think you need to choose one over the other if you decide to comment on the image. And this will be the last time (at least for a good long…

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Compositional Mind Games

There are times when I really struggle with composition when I’m cropping an image.  To a degree, composition is a matter of taste and personal preference, though most folks would agree on a few major principles.  Some of those might be: avoid clipping body parts or cropping too tight on the subject the subject usually (though not always) should not be centered in the frame leave plenty of room in the  frame in the direction the subject is facing, looking or flying (in the case of birds) Where I sometimes run into difficulty making a composition decision is when there are other compositional elements in the image that I might like to include in the final version of the photo.  Thanks largely to the influence of Richard Ditch, I’ve become fond of strong graphic lines in some of my images, as long as those lines come from natural or rustic elements (power poles or wires just won’t cut it with me). This summer I photographed a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk on an old, rustic pole fence in Beaverhead County, Montana and I’m having a very difficult time making cropping decisions on some of those images.  My natural tendency is to crop fairly tightly on the bird to get good detail on the subject but I also like the graphic lines provided by the fence with different cropping choices.  Several times I’ve thought I’d finally figured out which version I prefer, but when I came back to the computer a few hours later and looked at them one more time I was again undecided.  Compositional mind…

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