Fight Club

'Northern Nutcrackers (Nucifraga caryocatactes) often fight over food in the winter, as I saw while on the Vitosha mountain massif, Bulgaria. This could be explained by their typical behaviour of storing food in caches during wintertime. This caching of food is essential to their survival and their breeding strategy, because they usually start the breeding process when there is still snow on the ground. It could, therefore, be worth fighting over the available food to have a better breeding success. As the Nutcrackers were fighting quite frequently, I adjusted my shutter speed to freeze the motion and zoomed out so as not to clip the wings from the frame. I also overexposed the image in-camera considerably for artistic reasons.'

Alwin Hardenbol

Adjustments: Sharpened, adjusted tone and contrast, increased saturation, dodged and burned parts, reduced noise, and cropped. Camera; Nikon D500. Lens; Nikon 80-400mm at 112 mm, with ISO 5600, f/5.6, and 1/1600s.