Sometimes when you’re taking a picture of a bird something unexpected happens and you just keep shooting. This occurred to me while staying at the Klein Cedarberg Private Nature Reserve in South Africa. It was a bright morning and a Black Kite was floating overhead so I started to take pictures of it. All of a sudden it started to “eliminate” (official term for a bird in the act of pooping). I continued to take shots until it finished its business and flew away.
I didn’t think much about it until I got home and was working on the series during post-processing. The images of the bird were good and the sequence clearly showed the event. Now, I don’t usually share pics like the four below but I wanted to share with you how I got the bird to appear in the same location in the series.
I was taking pictures of the bird as it moved through the air and combined with the fact that I don’t have the steadiest of hands, the image of the bird was in a different location in each of the four uncropped frames. But when you look at the images below the bird appears to be in the same spot, as if it hadn’t moved. I accomplished this by positioning the head of the bird (using cropping) in the first image and then I put my finger right on the computer screen where the head ended up. I then cropped the next image so its head was in the same location as my finger, and so on for the next two pictures. As a result, the viewer sees the bird in the same location, making it easier to see what changed from one shot to the next. A crude but simple technique; otherwise the bird would have appeared in different locations within each frame.
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