Falling Out

[Dvir Barkay]

Ok so a bit of an out of the box type of image. I was at the dam shooting eagles, and in the distance I was a young bald eagle fly close to the dam. As he came a bit closer, a bird, which upon later LCD review I found out was a Peregrine Falcon, swooped in to scare him off. I assume that it is to protect the nest. The action happened about 800 feet or so away and so very far. This is a large crop, not 100% and it is sharp enough that at 100% you can see the catchlight in the falcons eyes, but considering that to get a close image I would have to drastically crop. I decided to use the overcast sky to my advantage, and anyhow I overexposed quite a bit to get details in the birds, and make a high key black and white. The compo is a bit unusual and am open to ideas. I gave a bit of room on the left so that the falcon had room to come from, also I liked how it feels like they are almost falling out of the frame the way it is framed currently. Open to ideas and thoughts on a rather different shot from my usual.

1DmrkIII, Canon 300/2.8 with x1.4TC, f/5, ISO 1000, 2.2mpxs of original 10.1, Conowingo dam, 2014

[gail bisson]

The action is great but it is just too big of a crop for me.
The comp you chose is interesting but I think I would prefer the birds to be in upper LHC with room for them to fall into.
Gail

[Dvir Barkay]

The action is great but it is just too big of a crop for me.
The comp you chose is interesting but I think I would prefer the birds to be in upper LHC with room for them to fall into.
Gail

Thanks Gail, crop wise it can hold up, its a big crop already, but it is still decently sharp at 100% as well. The issue is making the crop at this level, were the subjects are rather small, work. By LHC you mean left hand corner, as its already rather close to the left hand corner, I thought of a vertical as that might emphasize the fall even more.

[Randy Stout]

Dvir:

Gail stated the upper LHC, so they had more falling room.

I appreciate your looking at different ways to handle this neat interaction, but one limited by the small subject in frame.

Here is another option if you have the frames. If you have a series of shots from this encounter, you might try a composite of the different frames across the blank sky to show the whole story. The small size of each image would not be as problematic that way.

Keep trying new things, it is the only way to learn!

Cheers

Randy