10/25/2005: Sky Chase: falcon and starlings

[Undertoad]

This is the wildlife photo of the year. Says the BBC:

A swirling image of a peregrine falcon sweeping into a flock of starlings has won Manuel Presti this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.

The Italian caught the action scene, titled Sky Chase, high above a city park in Rome.

"Sky chase is a powerful image and, like it or not, it's one that you will never forget," said Mark Carwardine, one of this year's judges.
...
[says the photographer, Manuel Presti:]
"I was photographing with two cameras; one was with a wide-angle zoom to capture all the shapes, and one - which is this picture - with a long lens to capture the up-close action, the chase," Manuel told the BBC News website.

"The sky was cloudy so I overexposed the image intentionally to make it white. A slow shutter speed - 1/50th of a second - gives it this dynamic of the starlings moving under the psychological pressure of the peregrine diving."

An average photographer takes a lot of shots and hopes for the best. A great photographer looks at the subject and conditions and light, and figures out what can be done with it. When Manuel Presti made his decisions based on what he saw, well that's a great photographer. And then there's the crop, the framing. I wish we had a larger format view of this image, but anyway, what a great photo.