A Bald Eagle captured in flight, Seabeck, Washington.
I’m curious what people think can be improved, especially the composition, but processing issues also welcome.
Sony A7IV, FE 100-400 + 1.4x TC @ 560mm, 1/1000 at F8. ISO 200
I like that you caught the eagle coming at you and the soaring angle, so for me the composition works well. The sky doesn’t look quite natural to me with the purplish areas .
Looks like the techs on the eagle are fine. The larger version does show the details much better.
The sky looks really odd and unnatural. Over saturation is one of the culprits.
Thanks. I’ll take another look at the sky.
Thanks. I feel like the sky is very close to what I saw, but I’ll take another look at it.
Interesting. I went back and looked at the processing of this image, and the sky was almost literally unprocessed in the image. there’s no tone curve. there’s no HSL affecting blues (only a slight tweak to tone down the beak oranges), and saturation was 0 and vibrance was +8. white balance was set to the white on the head, so I haven’t cooled the image. So the sky may seem overprocessed, but as far as I can tell, that’s what the camera caught and I didn’t touch it…
thoughts?
My take on these issues is even if you didn’t add saturation to the sky, it is detracting from the image. Two comments both mentioned it. For me, that means go back and make the sky look natural because as presented it doesn’t. I’d still love to see the completely unprocessed raw file, just converted to a jpeg. Totally up to you what you decide to do with the image.
I’ve tried a few variations toning down the sky saturation, and I’ve decided I like it the way it is. It’s been sitting up on the wall at 11x14 for a couple of weeks, and I think, especially as a print, it makes a nice background to the bird. It was definitely a worthy suggestion to explore, though, and I appreciate your time in taking a look.
