Prairie Falcon with prey

Hi again! This is another picture of the prairie falcon my dad and I found on a road trip to Saskatchewan. We took an old dirt road near Drumheller, Alberta and spotted this guy on top of a ground squirrel he had just killed.

I posted a picture earlier of him just lifting off with his prize, this one is a few frames later.

I know it would be better if he were flying toward the camera but he didn't listen very well! My dad also told me that most people think it's best to have more space in front of the bird than behind when he's flying, but honestly I was just doing my best to keep him in the picture and in focus! My dad and I still really like the way this turned out because it shows the country he lives in.

I'll let my dad explain what we had to do in PhotoShop.

Thanks for looking!

Nikon D7000
AF-S Nikkor 300mm f/4 IF-ED with 1.4 TC
ISO 200
1/1600 @ f/5.6
handheld from truck window
cropped panoramic to 95% of original width

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Hi everyone! Marlise's dad here (John). This one was a little tricky because of the overall contrast in the scene. We loved the forest in the lower right but it rendered too dark when we nailed the settings for the subject. I ended up blending three separate layers, using ACR to extend the dynamic range by exposing one for shadows, one for mids and one for highlights. After it was all said and done I opened the shadows & highlights tool in PS and managed to tweak it a little more by opening the shadows just a little more and adding some mid-tone contrast, then masking some of the background back out to keep it as close to what we remembered as possible.

I also encountered a frustrating phenomenon on this one that crops up from time to time. When opening the original from ACR to PS, I ended up with high-contrast colour banding around some of the shadow-to-mid transitions. I don't know if any of you have ever experienced this, but it seems to happen in less than 1% of my processing jobs. Looks great in ACR, but gets this funky rainbow fringe in oof background contrast. Several images ago I decided to switch modes to CMYK and see what happened and sure enough, it immediately disappeared! So I processed everything at 16-bit CMYK and then switched to RGB at the end. Don't ask me why, but this seems to work every time! Any of you post processing experts out there who feel like enlightening me are more than welcome to do so...I'd appreciate it! Thanks!