What technical feedback would you like if any? Any/All
What artistic feedback would you like if any? Any/All
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
I was up on the shores of Lake Davis, camera in hand seeing what I could see and this Seagull became very interested in a little, shallow area of the lake and start to repeatedly power in making grabs at what I think freshwater shrimp? It was so intent on breakfast that it ignored me and I was able to get some shots of the action, this shot being my favorite. I really wanted to keep its splash behind it (part of the story). I left some room on the left of the bird. Is it cropped about right? D500, Nikon 2-500 lens, Nikon 1.4 TC, 1/3200th, f/8.0, ISO 2000, 550mm, hand held, Sharpen AI.
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Hi Dave. I really like the double splash and the gull looks quite sharp. I’m not quite as fond of the near shore and the image seems tilted a bit. I took the liberty of importing the image into Photoshop to demonstrate a couple of things.
This first image is to show one way of checking for tilt in reflection images. Unless there’s a lot of wave action, the reflection should line up vertically with the real image. This screen shot demonstrates how it looks when I draw a line connecting the beak tips.
Knowing that, I used the straighten tool to get rid of the tilt. In my version of PSCC it’s within the crop tool, so I could use content-aware crop to fill in the triangles created by the tilt correction. In the process of that, I cropped up to where the reflection hit the shore and did some cloning and clean up on what shore was left to make it all water and get most of the water drop reflections in.
I like the original image a lot, I just thought it could use a few finishing touches. Hopefully this points you in some directions you might want to look at.
Dennis-
Thanks for the suggestions. Sure enough, it is better. I appreciate ya!
d
Def lots of action to like. Really like that big splash, and prey is always a nice bonus. The light angle wasn’t great, and I agree with Dennis about the shore and the leveling. Tech-wise, I would have shot with a wider aperture and lowered the ISO. Otherwise, I’d personally like just a touch more room on the right.
Funny you mention room on the right. The last thing I did when preparing this to share was to shave off stuff on the right. This has been quite the lesson for me. I think all of things you folks are saying are well worth considering. This is exactly why I’m posting here… to get fresh eyes on files and learn from the responses. Thanks!
