Dennis’s small-ish in the frame bald eagle inspired me to post these. We don’t have a lot of bald eagles around here, but there is a lake where a few can be reliably seen. I made the trek a few weeks ago. There just so happened to be a pretty crazy sunrise, so I tried a couple silhouettes. I am interested in people’s feedback.
The first is a single frame.
The second is actually a panorama consisting of three vertical photos. It is something I do when I wind up too tight but don’t want to remove the teleconverter or, as in this case, when I want the subject to retain its original size/perspective in the frame. I have actually done it a bunch of times. I’ll post a barred owl image sometime to illustrate a different example. If you look closely, you can see geese flying in the background of both photos, which I thought gave a nice sense of time and place. All feedback welcome. (For the tech-oriented, I had to reduce the size of the panorama by >90%. It was originally over 17,000 pixels! These D850 files are something else. )
Techs:
D850
500 f/4 AF-S II + 1.4x tc
1/1600
f/5.6
ISO 160
You may only download this image to demonstrate post-processing techniques.
The first on does not do much for me, the tree too centered and not much interest.
I really like the second, moody and unique. I would take some off the top though.
I like both silhouettes, Kyle, though in both cases, I think you pushed the amount of information in the images a bit too far.
In the first image, the second tree top peeking into the bottom doesn’t seem to add anything much to the image, so I’d be tempted to crop above he main stem of it. I think the branches between there and the large horizontal on the main trunk actually belong to the smaller tree, but in the silhouette I don’t think that’s apparent enough to worry about.
The second image might work if I could see it six feet tall, but on a computer screen it’s just too tall and skinny. I also don’t think the reflection of the tree trunks adds all that much to the image, nor does the top tier of cloud, so at least for web presentation, I’d probably crop off most of the reflection and about half the clouds, but that’s just my taste.
Lyle; The top image is OK but not particularly exciting to me. The bottom image, on the other hand, got my attention right away! It has a very artistic look plus it show the environment which creates a peaceful mood. I, personally, wouldn’t change a thing with your composition. I think it would look great printed very large on either metal or canvas and hung in a matching vertical space, maybe even on a door! The only thing I think I would suggest to improve it would be to cool the tones a bit (bump up the blue) to make the sky and water a little more blue. I really like this!
Thank you all for the feedback. Always fun to try something different and out of the box. I personally liked the first one more than the consensus here, but it’s probably based more on my memory of the morning than the objective quality of the photo. I’ll definitely take the compositional suggestions into account. Also, Gary, I think your idea of leaning even more into the moodiness of the second image is a really good idea. And Dennis, you’re correct, the second image loses a lot of impact at this size.
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