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I took this last year. I like the frenzied action but find the background (as well as lighting) to be off putting. I can clone stamp the background to make it smoother. What are your thoughts? How would you deal with the background? Is this a lost cause? Please realize that I struggle with conflicting perspectives: trying to document behavior versus making images that are more artistic.
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There are certainly things you could do to soften the background and perhaps a bit to soften the very bright highlights but personally I'd view this as a great moment witnessed that due to light, distances and even so much going on didn't amount to a great photo. The light is very harsh which is hard to completely compensate for in post and things like the out of focus heron flying in the foreground is tough to deal with.
That said, I often use captures like this to see how much I can do in terms of salvage work and use them to improve my post processing tool kit. For instance I might work with selections (or masked layers) and blurring (e.g. Gaussian Blur filter) to see how much I could credibly soften the background (I wouldn't use the clone stamp for this). I might also try the Patch Tool or a Content Aware Fill on that brighter area of background above the central birds and use Curves or Shadow Highlight tools to see what I could do about the light on the central birds themselves.
In the end I might or might not end up with an image I'd share or print but hopefully I'd hone my image editing techniques for difficult situations and explore the limits of what works when editing tougher image problems and what simply won't work without better shooting light, a wider aperture or perhaps better subject to background distances. IOW, it's all an opportunity to learn and develop both post processing skills and to help you recognize when the light or the scene works and when the scene in front of you will just be hard to capture due to lighting or other factors.
Bill, Cleveland OH.
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I think a close crop to include just the several heads and necks seemingly emerging from the same body and the partial wing (on the viewers right) could make a compelling commentary on the frenzied activity. I'd totally crop away the foreground bird. If you're good in photoshop a blur filter for the background could soften it up.
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You might try to separate the in-focus subjects from the background. Put the background on a separate layer and run it through a Gaussian filter to smooth it out. Maybe darken it a bit and clone in edges where the subjects were. Then blend them back together using masks.
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Separating the subject from the background is hard as these particular birds do not have a smooth edge to them.
