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Pentax K5
Tamron SP AF 70-200mm f/2.8 Di LD Macro
Ok first of all , I want to thank you guys for your comments and compliments.
I had to wait until the right time to reply here to give you all thanks and answer questions. I do not like bumping my posts to the top of the list because there are literally hundreds of great images in this section of the forum
that are more deserving.
Getting down to brass Tax. The Tamron Lens......well, I think it pretty much speaks for itself here. Problem is, it's auto focus noisy. A shot like this, and noise, is like mixing oil and water.
You better be ready with all your camera settings and an approximation closely matched to where you think you'll be pulling the trigger. Do not touch the fire button until you're sure you have the framing you want, because that lens is going to move some on half fire to get focus. I use auto focus with shots like this because I am not fast enough to manually focus, for a shot like this where you're likely only going to get one........when they are this close and nearly buried in unwanted foreground or background crud. In this birds case it was foreground.
When you hit half fire for focus, when you're this close to the THIS bird, one of two things are going to happen. He/She's going to squat and take off away from you in the direction they are looking............or they are going to look right at you for a split second, then squat in a split second and take flight away from you very quickly.
A capture like this one is hard and it took a long time for me to get something like this. I used a quail in a small blacked out wire cage. I build makeshift blinds and wear a Ghillie suits. And I sit for hours and hours. Days, many days. Many days in different areas.
When and if a Raptor comes in, they come in hot and they hit the cage and roll it, with the bait in it. Since I don't want the upside down cage with a quail rolling around in it in the image, I wait for a moment, because the Raptor is not going to understand what just happened.
In that moment of confusion, you could, in theory, get decent shot. But that's not what happened with this Raptor. This one came in leery of what was going on, for some reason. Didn't try to hit the cage, but instead came in and landed in some crap in the foreground, completely away from where I thought I might get the shot. But still close. This bird wasn't anymore than 10 feet from me.
After trying to get shots like these for years, countless no shows, it happened twice in 7 days. On two different species of raptor.
In one of my other images here, " THIS is a Harris hawk" you can see what I'm talking about when they hear the auto focus and look right at you.
Yes, it's hard. It takes a lot of time. And you can't be sitting there squirming around, slapping at mosquito's or gnats when this is going on because he can see your movement from over a mile away. And you as a photographer, need to know near about where he/she's hanging out. And get there before light. You will sit a lot of days for nothing. Maybe years. Maybe never.
These are wild caught images. Anytime you do that, anything can happen, but most of the time, nothing happens.
So there's the story. I won't be bumping my images up due to my great respect for some of the stellar photographers here.
I would love for people to continue to see this image, and I thank you all for looking.
If anyone has any further questions, you can message me, and I'll be happy to answer.
So, this is my one and only reply here.
Be well,
LightSpeed
Last edited by BigMackCam; 03-17-2020 at 02:46 AM.
Reason: Removed very unnecessary and unwanted comments
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Quote: 
Post #1 by LightSpeed
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