About the Image(s)

For the first time in the 40 years or so I’ve lived in my neighborhood, an American Kestrel has taken up temporary residence, often hunting from a telephone pole directly across from my house. With the new pre-capture available on my new camera, I’ve gotten a few takeoff shots from poles and wires, but this was the first time I’ve seen him take prey where I could get a “clean” shot. I normally don’t care for wires or poles in my images, but I liked this image enough to accept it. The processing was more complex than usual. After the initial crop and straighten, I had to remove a bit of the top wire from the cropped image. The challenge to the shot was the poor light angle, which darkened and desaturated the subject. I increased the luminance and shadows a great deal on the bird, as well as increasing white. I had flight settings in the camera a high ISO which, especially after increasing the exposure in post, left a lot of noise in the image. First, I applied Topaz to the entire image, than I did an aggressive denoise in Lightroom and just applied it to the tail, where I didn’t think the loss of detail mattered much. I used NIK to bring up the contrast and detail. Using Color Efex I often use the detail tool selectively to lighten up areas that are too dark. I used it here just on the face and the bright area at the base of the belly, near the wire. I also did some burning in that area to further diminish what looked too bright to me which I might have caused in my earlier steps but was easy to correct. I diminished the highlights in the sky and added vibrance and contrast to the bird. Sony a1M2, 200-600 lens @ 600mm, 1/4000 second, f/6.3, ISO 3200.