Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Hawk eating prey

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[edit] Hawk eating prey

A hawk (juvenile red-tailed hawk — Buteo jamaicensis) eating its prey (California meadow vole — Microtis californicus).

Postproc (edit0)

Edit 1, by Fir0002

Edit 2, by Fir0002 - reduction of sharpening near tail as per Dscwhen's comments

Edit 3, by Fir0002 - lightening

Reason

It's a good and shocking image, shows how brutal the nature can show it's self. it's currently also nominated on commons, and I belive that the added criteria on wikipedia for featured pictures is valid for this picture.

Articles this image appears in

Death, Predation

Creator

Steve Jurvetson

Nominator

_→AzaToth

• Support — _→AzaToth 17:40, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support Nice! What a cute mouse! Very good depiction. HighInBC ^{(Need help? Ask me)} 17:45, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support Poor mouse, although I guess it's the way of things. Terri G 17:47, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

PS don't forget the fac tag. Terri G 17:48, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Fixed _→AzaToth 17:54, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

• Comment Commons nomination is at commons:Commons:Featured picture candidates/Image:Hawk eating prey.jpg _→AzaToth 17:54, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support This picture is not only high quality but also has incredible encyclopedic value. A very good shot. S h a r k f a c e 2 1 7 20:42, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose The entire bird is blurred, and that's not acceptable for FP - Adrian Pingstone 23:25, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I would say that this image is an exception of §1 of WIAFP in that concern. _→AzaToth 23:31, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

• Support Agree with AzaToth, the enc value largely compensates for any minor technical flaw. But I won't show it to my children... Alvesgaspar 23:41, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support How in the world did you get that good of a picture and angle?? I like how you can see the mouse's eyes WIDE open.--¿Why1991 ^{ESP. | Sign Here} 03:47, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support. Yum, yum. Stephen Turner (Talk) 08:17, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support. Apparently the mouse didn't see that coming. Not the best way to get ahead in life.. Thats a bit spineless of me to say from the comfort of my desktop though.. ;-) Diliff | (Talk) (Contribs) 10:31, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support. A bit of unnecessary space on top, but a great shot! Happy I'm not a mouse - or am I? [1] --Janke | Talk 11:46, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support. Excellent choice, AzaToth, quite the killer photograph. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 12:05, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
• Comment I'm very puzzled. We have a lot of supports here for an out-of-focus picture. You all seem to have been overwhelmed by the wonder of the picture itself and have ignored the fact that FPCs are expected to be in first class focus no matter how hard the pic may have been to acquire. At the moment a blurred pic seems certain of FPC status, something that I cannot remember having happened before! Really weird!! - Adrian Pingstone 13:34, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Mh, if you'd downsample it to a 1000px in height I bet it'd look sharp. Anyways, I wouldn't go as far as saying the bird is out of focus. It is jus a bit soft. And some features (edge of the wing) suggest its not a focus issue, but camera jitter due to the use of a strong telephoto lens. Lots of exceptions have been made from the rules for pictures which cannot easily be retaken, be they historic, or - like this one - of rare spectacular events. Thus, it gets a weak support from me. --Dschwen 13:59, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Agree with Dschwen. It looks about as I would expect under the circumstances. I suspect it is cropped significantly from the original image. A lot of the time, we downsample an image prior to uploading it for the benefit of perceived sharpness. That doesn't meant there is actually more detail. In this case, I don't think it has been downsampled so it will always be softer than we're used to and is probably slightly motion blurred as the shutter speed isn't particularly fast for the focal length. As Dschwen mentioned though, consider the sharpness at minimum resolution and I think you'll find it acceptable. Not ideal, obviously, but acceptable. Diliff | (Talk) (Contribs) 14:33, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support Excellent composition makes up for any lack of focus in the background. Off with 'is 'ead! --Bridgecross 14:06, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support. The picture is superb, and describes a predator clearly. The details, although not sharp, are still clear enough to see the hawk with the vole's head in its mouth, as the vole's body and organs fall to the ground. --RandomOrca2 20:04, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support Now I am really curious about what will be the responce to this picture when it is featured in main page... --antilived ^{T | C | G} 00:02, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
• Weak Oppose Look at this in the thumbnail, which is about how it would look like on the main page. The mouse being eaten is not very noticeable. The bulk of the frame is out-of-field background, jittery near background, and a slightly blurry photo of a hawk. The actual area of interest is only perhaps 700x1000, and blurry at that. If we downscale the picture to fix the blur, then the "featurable" part of the photo would clearly fail the resolution test. Basically, it passes the resolution test by the letter of the law, but fails in spirit. I suggest that if this is promoted, the POTD thumbnail should be taken from a smaller region so people have some idea what they're looking at. --Dgies 05:16, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Tried to "clean" the image up, but I'm no expert in these things. _→AzaToth 05:58, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
  • The POTD is 250px wide, and I'm sure Howcheng can make it 300 when asked. Nontheless even in the 200px thumb it is clear that the hawk has something in his beak. Thats good enough for me. Might be a tad to gorey for some people if we just show the severed head(?). --Dschwen 08:11, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
    • Like this? :) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by AzaToth (talk • contribs).
      

      

      Of with it's head!
      • Not sure if you were kidding or not. I think the thumbnail should cover the activity being depicted: from the mouse's body to the top of the bird's head, and leftwards to include the bird's leg. A mouse head zoom is excessively gory. --Dgies 16:01, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
        • hehe, yes, it was a joke :) _→AzaToth 18:04, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Support Edit 1. Great capture --Fir0002 10:09, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

• • On the off chance of sounding picky, but although the noise removal in the background is very nice, it is not necessary/overdone on the dirt in the fg. More importantly the bird gets posterized and the feathers loose subtle color nuances. Check the tail feathers, and look at the beak and eye, those look like they were painted with 4 colors now. Could you maybe create another edit? Pleeease? --Dschwen 10:49, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
    • See if Edit 2 is more to your liking, but what I think you are referring to as posterization is the effect of sharpening/haze cutting --Fir0002 22:38, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
      • Yeah, it's an improvement on the tail and the foreground. If you could tone it down like that for beak and eye it would be great. But you might want to hold off for now, as the original might be provided.--Dschwen 23:16, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
    • Agree with Dschwen (starting to sound like a fanboy) again. Not sure that the bird looks posterized, but certainly it looks a bit worse in the edit. I'll have a go at processing it tonight. I'd really like to get a hold of the original (preferably RAW), but I'll see what I can do with this. It looks about 1/3 stops overexposed and this could be corrected better from the RAW file. Diliff | (Talk) (Contribs) 13:22, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
      • I have mailed jurvetson asking if he have a lossless version of the image to share. _→AzaToth 18:05, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
        • Got a reply, he sadly doesn't have any raw version of the image. _→AzaToth 15:44, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

• Support Original. Please, please, PLEASE stop adding more than one edited version of the original image. As differences are only stylistic and often the "best" edit is chosen by personal preference, multiple minor edits sabotage the image's chances of being featured by lessening the likelihood of consensus on any one edit, thereby failing an image which would have otherwise achieved consensus. Noclip 04:58, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

  Just noting here that whenever I close a nomination I try to never let that happen. If I see a nomination with lots of support but no clear consensus on which edit I move it to the "requiring additional input" section. I will admit, however, that seeing five different version here depressed about the thought of having to close it... Raven4x4x 07:57, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

  • I can sympathise, but I agree that it would still get the required supports to avoid failing FP nomination.. The question is simply of minimising the unnecessary edits. The hard part is determining redundant edits and removing them from the nomination for simplicity. The trouble is when someone comes in, supports a particular edit and then promptly disappears from the discussion. If that edit was subsequently determined to be redundant, where would the new vote go? Maybe we can bring this to the FP talk page? Diliff | (Talk) (Contribs) 09:54, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

• Support. Brrr.--Eloquence* 06:50, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
• Comment. I was certain this photo was fake, the mouse head just looks really unnatural and kind of pixelated. But after viewing this set of photos on flickr, it seems a rather more probable photo. It still looks fake, but I'll admit it probably isn't. Not only is this behavior (decapitation) routine, the repeated discarding of intestines is also described. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. -Matthew Cieplak ^{(talk) (edits)} 10:32, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

It brings to mind a photoshop job because the mouse head is separated from its usual context, like what happens when you cut-and-paste in an image editor. Decapitated heads look unnatural! Redquark 14:32, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

• Suggest that if it is promoted, we use a cropped thumbnail like this for the main page POTD so that people can see what the subject really is. --Dgies 16:58, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
  

  

  Suggested main page POTD thmbnail
• Support. Not sure if my vote counts, but this is my favorite photo. In the next frame, she swallows the head whole. It is real (I can prove this via email to any curious people. You can email me at SteveJ@boxbe.com). The photo is cropped but not photoshopped. The background is blurry because of the depth-of-field. It is an intended effect to remove visual distraction. The bird and prey are in tack-sharp focus on my original. I wonder if you have a blurry version from someone else's post-processing? I re-sent the original to AzaToth on this list. I do have an interesting post-processing version done by Barry Schuler. I sent that to AzaToth too.

The photos on this page do look a little blurry to me. Here is a link to the original: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=226587515&size=o --jurvetson

Here is the image Jurvetson sended to me:

_→AzaToth 19:57, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. The closeup thumbnail for the main page is a good idea, you can't even tell it's eating from a full frame thumbnail --froth^{T C} 22:18, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

• Support. A pretty cool picture although it could be a little sharper. The colour is good too. User:Voshvoshka Dec 22, 6:20pm
• Support. One of the best I've seen here. Well composed, sharp, and highly encyclopedic.--DaveOinSF 02:10, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Emperor Support Just an awesome wildlife-related pic, one of the best I've ever seen. -- Walter Humala - Emperor of West Wikipedia|wanna Talk? 01:18, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Support One thing that often irks me about this section is that, if someone finds a decent photo of a flower or a bird on Wikipedia, they will immediately nominate it for FP status. This results in the dilution of the beauty of the nature genre of photos, as we just end up seeing many boring photos of each different avian species. This is NOT an example of such an image. Any flaws you might find with the actual photography is made up by the fact that this is far and away the most interesting "bird picture" ever posted on this site. Nilington 04:00 25 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support, and Strong Support for the using the proposed Main Page crop if/when the image appears on the Main Page. Though I admit that the latter is partly just perversity on my part, as the sheer number of Won't someone please think of the children! comments that'd result from it would doubtless provide a great source of entertainment. GeeJo ^(t)⁄_(c) • 18:02, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
• comment Sorry, the previous image was the enhanced version he sent me, here the original:
  

  

  The original file
  _→AzaToth 18:29, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support original or edit 2 I'm glad I'm not a rodent. :-) | AndonicO ^{Talk | Sign Here} 12:39, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Promoted Image:Hawk eating prey.jpg Raven4x4x 01:53, 28 December 2006 (UTC)