The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
I just love it when Pelicans show up at this pond. Today there were 3 or 4 of them and I patiently waited for someone to make a move. I got some good photos of them just swimming , and finally got some action .
Specific Feedback
Wondering if I adjusted the dehaze too much… and I tried to blur the background some.
Technical Details
Nikon z8, z180-600mm lens, focal length 600.
F/8 1/640, ISO 250
Critique Template
Use of the template is optional, but it can help spark ideas.
Nice idea for this image, but it isn’t ideal…
Looks as if you were into very harsh light, and the whites are quite blown. Not sure that is salvageable. For action, a SS of at least 2000-2500 works well, and a F stop as low as you can get away with for what you’re trying to get in focus.
Was there haze in the air? not sure why you used the de-haze…
Hi Sue, nice action pose you captured. Agree with Sandy on the critique. A faster shutter speed would have helped freeze the action more and also helped with exposure on the whites which are blown out. To expose for whites properly, I use “blinkies” (highlight alert notification is the Canon term) and make sure they are just barely not blinking for the proper settings.
For composition, I think you could add more space on the left to give the bird room to fly into. I like the trailing water drops as the birds is taking off.
Good advice above. For an action shot like this, I’d add that having more room in the frame gives a more pleasing presentation. Close crops such as this one work better for more static poses. An additional benefit is that you usually have less control over things like movement and light in action shots and having them smaller in the frame can help minimize the disadvantages.
Yes I do seem to crop too much. This was taken from quite a distance and was trying to catch all. Here is the original which is much better I think than what I posted… Thanks for your comment.
It does look like your original image was actually better than the post, Sue. The dehaze really wasn’t necessary and it boosts contrast and saturation. Since your whites were already a bit blown it really kicked them through the roof and made the orange bill a bit unrealistically gaudy. Don’t worry too much, these are the sorts of things we all did when we were starting out (except dehaze didn’t exist back then for me). You original is a difficult one to choose the crop because we all have a tendency to want to keep the cool splash on the right. In this case, probably the best bet is to crop just to the left of the splash and maybe take some off the bottom of the image, leaving the left side and top alone to provide room for the bird to not bang its head against the edge.
On the plus side you got the pelican in the frame nicely and you nailed the focus. While there’s a lot of argument about the best exposure mode for shooting birds, my preference, especially if I’m shooting in sunshine at white birds is to focus on something white and adjust my exposure so it’s just at the edge of being overexposed. Assuming you’re saving your images as raw files, you can go a little over that because the previews are all based on a jpeg image that has less dynamic range than the raw file.
You got a good series here. The last 3 won’t enlarge for me – you might try posting them again. Sometimes I think that happens when you close out of a post before they have fully uploaded – or something like that.
