A month ago, I spotted a dead tree while driving on the highway. There was lots of fog that day, and it looked perfectly creepy, covered with myriads of ravens on its branches. I immediately thought: "if a Halloween challenge shows up, I need this one!".
So I went there. When I arrived I realized that unfortunately, it was standing in the middle of a sand quarry. It was of course forbidden to enter, but since there was no worker, I parked my car a bit further away and climbed over the fence. The area was mostly a swamp with high herbs, and very quickly I got wet and covered in mud to the belt. Fantastic. When I finally reached the damn tree, there was not a single raven in view, to my disappointment. I took some photos of the tree nonetheless, and headed back to my car, with a new mission: find ravens on the way back to home.
Who knew these damn birds were such a pain to photograph?! I saw some of these in fields along the road: cars were passing by, and they just didn't care about, so I was quite confident that it would be an easy task... but as soon as I actually stopped the car, they immediately flew away! Each and every time! Damn birds. No way to reach them by walking to them, the results were even worse. Damn birds. In the end I was driving slowly, windows opened, the 600mm on the knees, playing the sniper through the windows, as fast as possible, as soon as the car was stopped. The 5D2 auto-focus not being the fastest one out there, it proved to be rather challenging, but I managed to grab some decent shots after a few hours of chase.
Back at home, my wife took care of the pumpkin carving, while I prepared the scarecrow outfit. We photographed both in the home studio, using quite different settings, since the light emitted by the candle in the pumpkin required a long exposure. I also took some feather photos while I was at it. Finally, around midnight, I took the barbecue outside once again, and snapped some flames and smoke.
The post-processing phase was not too complicated from a technical point of view (just the regular masking/blending stuff), but it wasn't easy to place the birds in a believable way. Lots of tries and discussions with my wife, but it was worth it, since we both like the final result.
Thank you all very much! It was definitely a fun challenge.
Statistics
Place: 1 out of 67 Avg (all users): 7.8897 Avg (commenters): 9.5000 Avg (participants): 7.5946 Avg (non-participants): 7.9907 Views since voting: 4461 Views during voting: 417 Votes: 145 Comments: 43 Favorites: 10 (view)
WD on your blue! And welcome to my world (of bird photography), especially BiF (Bird in Flight). Fish Eagles in bright sunlight with "baited" fish is not that difficult as totally random flight patterns or skittish birds :) Hope to see more 10's from you on my next challenge entry :)
Congrats on the image and ribbon - and welcome to the wonderful world of bird photography! Corvids especially (ravens, crows, jays) are super-intelligent and don't mind leading you on a merry chase :-0
One of my two favorites in the challenge - no problem giving this a 10 :) All the originals are incredible captures and the whole is fantastic - spooky and perfect for the season without being gory. Voted earlier.
0.o
i itch to enter challenges again everytime i see something this good. I figure if i try enough times maybe i begin to get close - its like you took a picture of a beautiful movie poster
Jack-o'-Scarecrow
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