Broadwing Hawk Re-Do

Call it Throw Back Thursday.  One of my favorite bird shots came up as a screen background last night on the home PC.  As I looked at it, I started to think I could re do this photo a bit better these days.  And an afternoon project was born.

I am far from a Hawk expert.  I scoured lots of web photos to come up with this is a 'Broadwing' Hawk.  And I looked for help from other websites such as the page that lists what birds were seen at the Refuge for the day, or recently, as reported by much more expert birders.  So if someone says this isn't a BWH, I counter with the photo is good enough that you can tell and I really did try to identify it correctly.

The photo comes from September of 2018.  I was hiking the Nature Refuge with the D7200 and 70-300 lens.  I came across a veteran birder at the Grefe Tower observation deck.  He instantly recognized me as a person who could only ruin his day if I was allowed to roam freely.  Thankfully he did not carry a stun gun that day.  But as a nice member of the birder community, he motioned me to be quiet, and to come up on the tower.  (The tower is about four feet off the ground.)  He motioned for me to look over the far end of the tower deck, look over past the road and in the trees.  Looking back at me like I was a freshly fried donut was this BWH.  It was relatively far away at probably 20 to 30 yards.  The original shot frame is this:

For me to get this shot I had to extend the lens to its full reach.  And shoot with a reduced sensor size.  It's a physics thing.  Anyway, this is an effective lens angle, or reach, of 600 mm.  If I remember right, I braced myself on one of the tower rails for the shot.  The BWH did its part by just sitting still, even when a car passed within six feet below it, it just sat still.  (I bet the car occupants didn't even see the bird.  Rookies.)  Other photo information, 1/800th sec, f/5.6, ISO 640.

When this showed as the background on the monitor last night, I thought with some improved processing techniques and newer software I might be able to improve on this result.  This is the image from the original post in January of 2019: Eyes on Eyes

This was from a time when I was framing the finished shots with a black and white border.  I have since gone borderless.  The eye in the shadow always bothered me as well.  I have since improved on my shadow work.   The 'improved' shot.

I didn't boost any of the colors as much in the re do shot.  I could be talked into maybe giving it more of a vibrant look, but I seem to be going in a more realistic look phase.  The improvement of shadowed eye is reason alone to delete the original photo.  The bird's feet and tail also improved with more definition.  The overall definition or sharpness improved a bit.  In the end, the dampening of the eye shadow is the difference until you get into the pixel peeping.  I did use Gigapixel to help out, I think it is worth the time.