I took this picture back in May at the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. They have a photo blind that you can reserve. I had been their previously in February and I took about 1,000 pictures then. The refuge was flooded in February and there were a lot of waterfowl and two bald eagles. I still need to process most of those photos. When I went to the refuge in May, they had drained the water, which surprised me. There was now just a little pond next to the blind. But it was fun watching these Belted Kingfisher’s plunge into the the water and return with small fish. I have a photo of a Kingfisher with a fish in its beak that I will post in a few days.
But there were two Kingfishers that started to battle with each other. I think one is a male and the other is a female. It was hard to pick which photo to post since I shot as quickly as I could while they were fighting. Unfortunately, there were some branches in the way that block the truly spectacular photos that I took. This one is the best compromise of capturing the battle and not being blocked by too many branches. I did crop this a little bit and then I enlarged it using Genuine Fractals, which works amazingly well.
I rented a Nikon 600mm f/4 AF-S II from Pro Photo Supply in Portland for use in the blind. I had it on a tripod. This lens is very heavy to try and hand shoot. I did that on a hike in Central Oregon but I didn’t get any really good shots from that hike. I’ll process and post those images in a few days as well. Mainly of Golden Eagles and assorted birds. The aperture for this shot is set at it lowest setting of f/4 and the shutter is at 1/1000 second. The shutter almost completely freezes the birds’ motions except for the edge of its wings. It was sunny out for this shot so I was lucky to get that fast of a shutter speed but it would always be nice to get a faster shutter speed and completely freeze the motion. But this way, the blurring gives the impression of the speed at which they were attacking each other.
I used the Topaz Adjust filter Portrait Drama for just the birds to bring out a little more detail. I used Photoshop to mask in a 50% transparency of the Portrait Drama photo into the photo that I had originally adjusted in Lightroom. Because of the strong sunlight, I had to correct some fill lighting in Lightroom to balance the colors and make both birds visible.
