I had just finished watching
Into the Okavango when it happened. My mind was filled with hippos, elephants, red ball suns and paddling when out of the corner of my eye I saw two birds fly towards the dining room glass door. One I thought might be Eurasian Collared Dove as it was big and light under the wing. The other bird was dark. Oh no, I thought. The thunk was barely audible. I hopped up, hoping that if a bird were injured it would be the Collared Dove.
There was a bird injured. It wasn't the Collared Dove. In fact there was no Collared Dove on the scene. The bird I thought was a dove was actually a juvenile Sharp-shinned Hawk and it had firmly pinned a Starling to our snowy deck. The Starling was in rough shape but was trying to fight back, pecking at the hawk every time the hawk lowered its head to bite.
I did the only thing that there was to be done. I ran and got my camera.
I knew that getting a good picture would be a challenge. As mentioned previously,
snow is a challenge for me. (Still haven't figured it out) Also, the sun's position was not
directly opposite but opposite enough. Fortunately the sun was high enough that the birds weren't back lit but the shadows, oh the shadows. And finally, I was shooting through a window in a bathrobe recovering from viral crud on a bitter, blustery day.
But you shoot the scene you are handed. Unless I was willing to go outside and creep around in the snow and risk scaring the bird away, this is what I had to deal with.
So I dealt. I dealt by taking 585 photos. The vast, vast majority were crap or worse than crap. But a few came out good and with a little help from Google Photo Auto filter and some Instagram magic two came out quite good.
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| This photo was auto adjusted by Google Photos. I also cropped through Instagram and added the Lark filter. |
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| Original photo ƒ/2.8 1/2000 105.1mm ISO100 |
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| I did some mad Instagramming on this one. I again used the Lark filter but fiddled with the light, brightness, color, and saturation. I was particularly interested in making the bars on the tail pop because that is an important identifying characteristic. |
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| Original photo ƒ/4 1/1600 36.1mm ISO100 |
