The Osprey Tree

Consider this image as proof that Osprey do NOT hatch from eggs like normal birds - the actually come from (or should I say "bloom"?) from rare and elusive trees found only in remote mountain valleys!

This long-dead ponderosa pine sits near a large Osprey nest that is active each year. It's located not far from my cabin and I always check it out if I'm passing by it. On this spring morning I happened to be going by it with a full load of camera gear (including both my 600mm f4 VR and my 400mm VR and 1.4x and 2x tele-converters) so I was well equipped to grab some images in the beautiful pre-sunrise light.

The first thing that struck me about the scene was how much it looked like a painting, even to the naked eye. In particular, it reminded me of the work of Henry Vickers - a prominent Canadian aboriginal painter whose work I quite like. The mountains behind the tree were in the distance, so I knew that the final image would look even MORE painterly if I chose a long telephoto lens (to render the background completely out-of-focus) to capture the avian-scape.

Subject: Male and female Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) perched in tree just prior to sunrsie
Location: Findlay Creek, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D3s
Lens: 600mm f4 VR. Supported on tripod with Wimberley head.
Exposure: 1/640s @ f8; +0.33 stop compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting of camera.
Crop: This is about 90% of full frame

NOTE: Both the pink (the sky) and the blue (out-of-focus shaded mountains) were in the original scene. I did enhance the blue (fading along a gradient from bottom to top), but the pink is all natural!

All comments and critiques welcome, but probably better to view larger image first.

Cheers...

Brad