Fraptorday: Weekly Raptor

Here’s a couple of photographs from the first falconry meet Diane and I attended, back around 1983 in Florida. The event was hosted by the Florida Hawking Fraternity and held near Kissimmee, Florida.

Jerry Hollifield and his hen red-tailed hawk, Bee. What you don’t see in this photo is the pair of small circular scars on Jerry’s left forearm, about midway, one on top and the other on the bottom, where Bee had settled with one talon off Jerry’s glove when someone startled her into clenching, putting that talon all the way through his arm.

And a picture of the weathering area at the meet.

These photos come from the days when most of what I shot was black-and-white film. This is stretching things a bit for recall, but the most likely configuration would have been a Nikon F2 camera, Nikkor 200mm f/4 lens, and Kodak Tri-X Pan film. I digitized the negatives using a Durst Chromapro slide duplicator, Nikon D2Xs camera, Nikkor AI Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 lens. Post-processing in Corel Photo-Paint: invert, desaturate, contrast enhancement, resample, and unsharp mask, in that order.