Redfooted falcon/kestrel mating
Falco vespertinus
A lovely and rare bird. I am so grateful. Thanks to Bence Matés efforts in Hungary (working with a closed national park) I got the opportunity to photograph the redfooted for a couple of days, unfortunately day 2 was destroyed because of weather condition. I will post a series of mating when that thread will start to work, the horizontal images.
I only got three or four matings where they looked in a rather satisfactory direction, because of the wind (coming from wrong direction) they turned the wrong way too many times. Also I believe this was a young couple, their coordination wasn't so good as another couple I could watch further away. Too often the male didn't understand what the female wanted and instead flew away, other times the female just flew away when he was in the mood etcetera.
Before this series of shots I had just taken verticals, so this one had cropped wings, I also wanted to test a vertical. I have now cropped it a little bit more than the original, in the way I will use it in the book (maybe I will crop it even more, I'll see in a week). Working on my fifth book in three years I have learnt that cropping for exhibitions, and also the web (where I havn't published nearly anything before), is another thing than cropping for a book page. When you design a book you can skip some of the surrounding area, which you may want or actually need in another context for showing the same photo. I don't know why it is like that, but it surely is. Some crops you make for a book will be just too tight for an exhibition.
Some images I just don't know what to do with, I mean when it comes to cropping. Probably because I wanted them different. But I must use this one because of the expression of the female. And it must be a full page. I was so nervous and excited of these birds and this opportunity when they first time started to mate.
I have only worked the photo on my laptop so far, so I hope colors etcetera are OK. And also tha I managed to get it into sRGB, I hope.:D
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Originally Posted by Arthur Morris
