Fraptorday: Weekly Raptor

This is one of my favorite pictures of Rusty, our female Harris’s hawk. This was taken in Santee, California, shortly after Rusty had tried to catch a duck, and gotten wet in the process.

This was shot with a Sony Cybershot F-505 camera, a 2 megapixel digicam with a Carl Zeiss zoom lens. If I recall correctly, I used the built-in flash with this shot to light up the rock and Rusty, bringing those values in line with the sky in the background. The picture has been resized and a small amount of unsharp mask applied to it. In general, the in-camera sharpening of consumer digital cameras is pretty aggressive, so additional sharpening has to be done with a light touch to avoid over-emphasis of artifacts.