Bill Holsten Photography

See the "Raptors Close Up" album in my Photo Gallery for "undoctored" (except for cropping to remove offending human body parts) images of the raptors I saw that day.

On January 9, 2010 I attended a presentation at the Wildlife Research Institute in Ramona, CA.  Five species of raptors, three of which had been trapped and banded that morning, were presented in an outdoor setting by handlers (images on left).  I was able to obtain several quality photos from a distance of 10-30 feet.

By carefully editing with Photoshop, I tranformed some of these images into something a bit more natural looking by cropping out the handler, restraints on the bird's talons, telephone wires, faces in the crowd, etc, and restoring some of the bird's body parts to create a whole bird (images on right).