Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
I was at the Yaquina Bay Estuary in golden hour, watching about 15 nearby pelicans. I love this image especially the lines made by the pelican posing.
1/4000 sec at f9.0 ISO 1600
OM-1 camera with M100-400 f5.0-6.3 +MC14
560MM
Welcome to NPN and the Avian forum, Ilene. This is a nice first post. I too love the lines of the pelican in this pose. There are a couple of things I do notice that might help. The shoreline isn’t straight and it may well not have been so, but it gives the look to the image that it’s not level. If it doesn’t make the pelican too off balanced looking you might want to level that boundary. Usually we’ll try to level it based on the reflection, but you this one posed too close to the shore and there’s not enough reflection to do any good, so about all you can do is play it by looks.
The second thing I noticed is that the bird’s head isn’t in sharp focus, though the body is. The way the human mind works is that we make eye contact, so the most critical thing to have sharp in a photograph of an animal is the eye. Also, since this is a big bird and you had plenty of light, you could have stopped down quite a bit more and still had plenty of shutter speed, That would have increased your depth of field and given you the ability to get more of the bird in sharp focus.
Again, welcome to NPN and the Avian forum. I look forward to seeing lots more of your images.
Ilene, welcome to NPN. Amazing to get a Pelican down on the beach. I haven’t had that opportunity yet. It looks like you were at eye level which is really good. I agree with @Dennis_Plank. Looking forward to more of your images.
Hi Ilene and welcome to NPN - so glad you joined us and I hope you find this your new home for nature photography. This is a nice image you’ve chosen to share with us. Your repost looks better with the horizon straighter. For future reference you can edit your original post by clicking the pencil icon at the bottom. By adding your updated photo to the first post we can flip through them in the viewer for easier comparison.
Have you been using the OM-1 long? One thing I find helpful with my wildlife photography is to engage focus peaking so that I know what’s going to be crisp and what isn’t. Sometimes birds move too fast to fix a bad focus grab, but I also have manual focus adjustments turned on in menu settings. Being able to quickly shift the focus with the manual focus ring is sometimes very helpful in these situations. I would be surprised if the OM-1 didn’t have this function.
Anyway…If you have any questions about site navigation or posting, feel free to ping me or any of the other moderators (yeah, I volunteer them all the time, lol). You can do that by using the chat bubble or the private message icon on the user card when you click on someone’s name. Oh and you can hit the chat bubble at the top next to the New Post button to find communal chats like Photo share, Site support and Campfire.
