The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
This is another from a week and a half ago at our local “duck” pond. This is the closest one of these normally skittish birds has ever come for me. Once again, I was lying on the observation platform shooting between the rails. There’s not enough room under the bottom rail, but just enough for this lens between the bottom and second rail.
Specific Feedback
I did quite a bit of cleanup in the water and I’m afraid it may show in places. I also brought the darker areas of the bird up quite a bit using a levels adjustment through a luminosity mask and I’d like to know if it looks forced.
Technical Details
Sony A1, FE 200-600 + 1.4 TC @ 840 mm, lens hood wedged in railing, f/9, 1/640, iso 1600, manual exposure. Processed in LR & PS CC. Cropped to 6986x4894. Taken March 30th at 9:46 AM.
Hi Dennis, this is a beautiful capture it appears. Striking colors that don’t seem forced to me. The transition from the neck plumage to the body is stark but I am thinking that is natural. I haven’t had the opportunity to view this species up close but that’s my two cents anyway. I don’t notice any artifacts in the water from the clean up. You might consider cropping it from the bottom a tad and perhaps removing the brighter underwater stick. A fine image.
This is an awesome image to my eyes, the colors, iridescence, the position in the frame, the pose, the darkness of the water, details, all are wonderful.
I don’t think you pushed or forced the colors too much at all, it looks great to me!
You and the other bird photographers are inspiring me to break out the Sigma 150-600 lens and go to a local pond that’s known for waterfowl birds.
I do see some very minor areas that I ‘think’ were cloned out, but, if you hadn’t mentioned it, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
As @Allen_Sparks mentioned, the transition from the neck to the body is fairly stark, obviously there’s a lot of detail there but the white could stand to be lowered a bit IMHO.
I used a levels mask and slid the middle slider to the right to .70 and that seemed to bring the level of white down to an average of 220 (down from an average of 240).
There was also some color in that area so I added a Hue/Saturation mask and desaturated those quite a bit.
I may have went farther with the cloning in the FG than needed but I was there so why not. I decided to clone out the stick just under the surface and clone in some of the reflected whites in the area where the stick was at, then apply some blurring to blend it in some (I may have overdone the blending with the blur tool though).
This would have been a better quality job if it had been done in the RAW file, but I think you can get the idea with the jpeg edit example.
The clone tool was set at about 30% opacity and about the diameter of the Bufflehead’s eye, the key to good cloning in my opinion is resetting the origin point very often and using ‘Aligned’ for horizontal and vertical but choose an origin that lines up with the color you want. It takes a bunch of back and forth strokes but I feel it’s worth the effort it in the end.
I also added a gradient exposure mask so the lower portion in the FG was a little darker just to push a little more attention to the Bufflehead.
Of course none of this was needed at all, the original image presented looked great to begin with!
This is just an example of how far you could take it if you wanted to spend the extra time on it.
Thanks, Merv. I can really see a big difference in the foreground. I’ll have to stick this in my “photoshop tricks” folder. Lowering the whites also showed nicely. I have a bad habit of ignoring them unless they’re actually blown, but they do make detail hard to see when they’re up against the edge.
I don’t know why, but for me, I don’t critique my own images the way I should, which means that I don’t edit mine the way I should. I still haven’t figured out why that is.
For some reason it’s easier to see things that might improve someone else’s image, maybe I’m not the only one that has that trouble?
Your original version of this is still awesome in my view!
