A hawk (juvenile red-tailed hawk — Buteo jamaicensis) eating its prey (California meadow vole — Microtis californicus).Postproc (edit0)Edit 1, by Fir0002Edit 2, by Fir0002 - reduction of sharpening near tail as per Dscwhen's commentsEdit 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.
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)[reply]
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 Pingstone13:34, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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. --Dschwen13:59, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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. --RandomOrca220:04, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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. --Dgies05:16, 21 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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(?). --Dschwen08:11, 21 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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. --Dgies16:01, 21 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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? --Dschwen10:49, 21 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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 --Fir000222:38, 21 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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.--Dschwen23:16, 21 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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. Noclip04:58, 22 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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... Raven4x4x07:57, 22 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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! Redquark14:32, 22 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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. --Dgies16:58, 22 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]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.
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 --frothTC22:18, 22 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Support. A pretty cool picture although it could be a little sharper. The colour is good too. User:Voshvoshka Dec 22, 6:20pm
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 Edit 1. Great capture --Fir0002 10:09, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
|wanna Talk? 01:18, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
![[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Janke.jpg){kind=link}
