Head to Head

While waiting in hope of a pine marten recently at Irish Photography Hides in Laois I took a lot of photos of small garden birds.  The electronic shutter on a mirrorless camera means you can take silent bursts of shots without being noticed by the animals and birds in the area.  I started to notice a significant level of aggression between a male siskin and a female chaffinch.  The male sisken would fly in heading for the female chaffinch munching away on food, a showdown would then ensue.
I used a fast shutter speed of 1/5000 sec. as I was aiming to get the flying action of the two birds.  The aperture was f8 and the ISO was 2000.  Unfortunately the birds flew higher than expected and they were position in the top left corner of the frame.  I cropped some of the image and then expanded the top and the left and used content aware fill in photoshop to fill in the blank background.  It is a fantastic feature in Photoshop but sometimes it is not perfect and you need to clone around the filled in area to give a more natural background.  Unfortunately the image will not be deemed a true nature shot because of creating the additional background and using the clone option.  However I particularly like the almost boxing stance of the the two birds in the image and felt it was worth saving. 
 

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