There was a flock of Least Sandpipers feeding at the waters edge of the incoming tide and I was able to approach fairly close by staying very low and moving slow. These are tiny little birds (almost exactly the size of the Violet Green Swallows that were flying around at the same time, only with longer legs.) I ended up sitting on the ground and laid the camera beside me on the rubber pad I was using to keep dry. That gave me the low angle you see in this shot. All I had to do was tilt the lcd screen 90° to compose the shots and rotate the camera to follow the action.
Excellent detail and I really like your low angle, Gary. I don’t know why we don’t have articulated lcd screens in the Canon dslrs. I had one in my first digital p&s ages ago.
Your technique worked well in capturing this peep. The bright bokeh in the upper LH corner tends to d5raw my eye, but its an easy fix if you find it troublesome. Other than that, a wonderful image as presented…Jim
Hi Gary, I enjoy these low to the ground images. Putting your face and gear a few inches off the ground to get eye level will always get you kudos plus a compelling image.
After looking thru the image, there is a green color cast, the specular highlights also are distracting and the OOF rocks in the foreground don’t add to the story.
I spent some time working on these issues. Perhaps you’ll consider these areas in the future during your post processing.
Thanks for taking the time and effort to demonstrate your recommendations, Ed. Removing the specular highlights and cropping most of the oof rocks were good advice. The color difference is probably a result of different monitor calibrations as your version appears to have a slight red color cast on my monitor. I compared on my android tablet and my Microsoft Surface tablet and they both agree with my monitor.
Hi Gary, I see what you are saying, somewhere in my retouch workflow I introduced a red hue cast. Good Catch. I am wondering if it because I am retouching a JPEG. I think I saw Sean Bagshaw video where he adjusts his CC19 edit/color settings when retouching jpegs, I’ll have to look into that. As well as I think I did a global adjustment with NIK when I just wanted to hit the bird. Anyway I screwed up somewhere.
I frequently calibrate my monitor, and I checked the image color gamut vs Adobe RGB gamut vs Monitor profile and everything checked okay. So it’s not the monitor, though it could have been
I ran a black,medium grey, white point action and it fixed the color cast problem. Here is a repost …are you still seeing a red cast ?
This one is perfect, Ed. In fact, when I compare I can see the very slight green cast in the original. You have a good eye! Thank you for all the time and effort spent to help me out!
