Captured by the Camera - "I caught it - It's mine"

I Caught it - It's mine

Always have a camera close at hand if you want shots like this. I was in our sitting room and there was a loud bang and I glanced towards the French windows. Obviously something had hit the window hard and bounced off. Since the shrubs have grown tall it could not be a football from the local play area - so yet another bird had flown into the window at speed. Was first aid needed? I rushed towards the window. A glance at what had happened and I put my hand in my left trouser pocket and grabbed my trusty Canon Powershot SX120 camera which I have with me all the time, and started shooting on automatic.

Only about 10-12 feet away, on the other side of the window, there was a sparrow hawk with a very dead looking collared dove on the edge of the lawn. It was glaring at me - as it had not expected competition over the body. It took it about 30 seconds (and me about 4 shots) before it decided to fly off (slowly because of the weight). I was then able to get some more shots but in a less satisfactory position and at a much greater distance.

Last week the Tring Camera Club held a competition of "Nature" prints and I decided that this was one of the two I was going to enter. There was one problem - the background. Not only had the lawn not been cut - but it was covered with very distracting dead leaves.

However I have been using a copy of Corel Paint Shop Pro for many years to repair old photographs on my web site Genealogy in Hertfordshire and decided to have a go. No one appears to have noticed that, for example, there are two identical tufts of grass in the bottom left hand corner. In fact there were many complimentary comments - but at the time of posting this I haven't seen the ranking scores.  There was also one useful suggestion. I only joined the club in January and this was the first time I had submitted a mounted print. To get started I had only one size frame (for A4 prints) and I ended up with the head of the sparrow hawk was too near the edge of the frame and cropping for a squarer frame with a little more grass would have been better.