Patrick Booth, Rapid (ANIMALS 2024)

Web:

https://lazydaze.photo/

Australian Hobby - Falco longipennis - 1050mm @ 1/4000 sec f 8 Iso 2000 Shot handheld from boat These birds take off to hunt prey like a coiled up spring and can gain an incredible amount of lift from just one wingbeat thrusting them forward at a rapid rate. Look at the way the wind is getting forced through the curved envelope of the inside of the upper wing resembling the cowling of a modern fighter jet. Through the study of the fastest birds, engineers were able adapt the shape of the wing to aircraft that first broke the sound barrier at mach 1 and then progressed to pull up to 9 g and top speeds of mach 1.6 or 1960 km/h in the present day. This wild Australian Hobby pictured here is a compact apex predator that has a top speed of 160 km/h, having the ability to then change direction and pull several g’s through tight turns when their prey (often Welcome Swallow) tries to evade them. This image was processed into a black and white from a raw file in Photoshop Camera Raw using one of the mono presets and then by using the highlights slider, I was able to remove a slight halo around the birds outline by turning it up to the maximum making the background white. When shooting really fast birds in flight at high shutter speeds and ISO’S there are several factors that play into these halos/chromatic aberrations, like sky/background colour, air temperature and heat haze/diffraction. This is one of three sequential images and I ended up choosing this one over the other two because of that coiled up posture of the subject, slightly blurred wingtips and the obvious branch that it has taken off from.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.