Stills

Rex, this is about a stop over-exposed. When I'm shooting for this project I usually rattle off a few dozen pics and then return to the camera to check for exposure and focus etc for the rest of the session. This was one of the test shots - proved to be the best of the day.....such is life.
 

The over-exposure does make it look as though flash was used (particularly the ground) but a shot well worth preserving. I presume that these are Siskins; their yellow suits this motion/blur capture of the dispute. The same done with sparrows would be a bit difficult to untangle! Is that the female on the ground I wonder?
 

John, yes Siskins, and that is a female on the ground hunting through the spilt seeds.

We have no sparrows here, but, yes, I have to be more careful with background for brown birds.

Mid air fights like this are a specialty of the Siskins. The normal pattern is that they go directly upwards in a spiral until one of them breaks off.
 

Three brightly colored images in a row! Your siskins seem really brilliant compared to any I've seen here.

Although I appreciate the action shown and not adverse to some motion blur to help convey that, I'd probably prefer it with some point of focus -- in the birds' heads perhaps. I do like the "karate kick" a lot!
 

Very interesting. The over exposure brings out the yellow in a triking way. At least I presume it is the over-exposure. I know little in colour. May I say I find the background looks terrible?
 

Christina/Stephane,

There is channel clipping in some parts of the yellow areas (and specifically the lower tail), which contributes to the glow in the dark rendition of the colour. However, these are bright birds. In dull light, and sitting all folded up in a tree, they don't look it, but the wing and tail flashes are a vivid colour and catch the light very well.

Stephane - care to expand on the 'terrible' comment? It isn't that I disagree with you, but I would be interested to find out what aspect you are picking out.
 

Umm. I think that the background is disturbing. To add to its OoF characteristic the background also appears to have some motion blur and possibly a bit of bokeh which is granular. All of that coupled with the highlights makes my eyes 'confused' as I try to make sense of the background.

I don't know how much PP work you are prepared to do on an image but having a go at removing highlights, adding blur and darkening the background would be my first thoughts.
 

appears to have some motion blur and possibly a bit of bokeh which is granular

Colour noise from an E1 sensor at ISO 400 I think. That and the not-always-pleasant bokeh from the ZD lens.

I don't know how much PP work you are prepared to do....

Not that much :-)

If you don't mind, I'd like to pursue this a bit. Ignore the technical failing of the sensor....that aside, this is a reasonable representation of what the world looked like from the position of the camera.

There would be a difficulty in changing the tone of the background without altering the contrast in the birds (which is currently accurate). I had considered spraying the ground with water to darken it, but I rejected that at the time. No good reason that I can remember. Probably the hose was in use somewhere else.

But to try and turn this into a question - the issues being raised are aesthetic ones (and to reiterate, ones with which I agree), yet the photo was made with documentary intent. If I had said 'think of this as the Siskin equivalent of the D-day landings' would the same thought have occupied you?
 

The D-day landings were shot in b/w? Interesting question though. Without wishing to lengthen the debate, is it possible the the 'granularity' and colour noise is heightened by the over-exposure?
 

John,

I see the worst of the colour noise at around the top quarter tone. The light browns are clearly speckled red and blue. Neutral highlights at ISO 400 and above have always been the E1's downfall.

Some of the granularity is probably made worse by the over-exposure because there are point spots of pure white (the 'earth' is in fact mostly sand, and the crystals are creating unlikely highlights).
 

You are capturing an activity that the eye rarely sees clearly: a flurry of feathers with some high pitched chirping. All over before it really gets started. That is why this shot works for me. It works much stronger than the sharp clinical shots as the action is captured as you'd see it with your own eyes and your mind can easily fill in for the rest of the senses. The head of the top bird is well angled to add a sense of power through that beak and into its buddy. The flailing legs and flared wings add and extra dimension. The third bird on the floor adds a sense of normality as it seems to be foraging. Given all this I can ignore all the technical talk about noise, sensors and PP in PS.

Lose the top third though...
 

Akikana's comment reminded me of a quote that comes from one of my favourite sculptors.

"When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. . . . If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit."
Constantin Brancusi.
 

So, D-day crossed with Brancusi! Compositionally, I disagree with Akikana about the top third despite everything else that we have talked about.
 

My crop suggestion is for environmental reasons. These fights are usually in confined areas - i.e. little posturing all action.
 

I'd second akikana's crop suggestion, but the noise/bokeh/whatever in the background doesn't bother me. You can't choose your background for a shot like this, so why bother worrying about it.

I'd be tempted to try this in B&W. There's a n abstract quality to this that I think would work well as a high contrast B&W.

I see the motion blur as the key to this. A lot photographers would have tried to freeze that action, and I think we would have missed something as a result.
 

matt - this project started as a high contrast mono project and has drifted off to become a colour one.

One option for the background is to place a black, or white, sheet of material behind the target zone.

The freeze/not freeze decision is difficult. This is actually one of the more frozen shots that I've done. There is an interesting interaction between the level of blur and the background. The cleaner the background (like white sky), the more blur that the photos can take.
 

Thanks all for all the comments, quotes and thoughts.
 

I "played" a bit with this image and found that a darker background, and more realistic color gamut grounded the birds and muted the effect, rather than helping.

The whole motion blur thing I find to be tricky in general -- the most successful (to me) images of this type I've seen have a portion in sharp focus and another portion motion blur, a fine line, difficult to achieve.

This image does work on the "documentary" level as I understand it -- but having the background so busy, noisy, and blurry, doesn't even help that aspect of it -- and I agree with the crop suggestion.