The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
I was incredibly lucky to find a green heron hunting from a tree in a quiet corner of Peaceful Waters Sanctuary near Boca Raton, FL during a March photography workshop. I watched for 20 minutes as the heron crept around on the branches at glacial speed. Finally it located a target, and took a bit stretching down toward the water before the release. I caught all of it with ProCapture.
Specific Feedback
The background here was really messy (I can provide the original) and I did a good bit of cleanup of branches. I’d greatly appreciate feedback and other suggestions. This was an incredible thing to see - and no one was around but me - and I want to do this bird justice with my edits.
Technical Details
OM-1 Mark II, 1/4000s, f/6.3, ISO 6400, 123mm
Processed in Lightroom and Photoshop, removed some branches but did not change the character of the location
What a great capture here Debbie. Timing sure is everything with a bird moving fast like this one. I would suggest toning down the highlights in the background so they are less distracting. I don’t think it’s necessary to remove those remaining branches, but it wouldn’t hurt to do so.
Debbie, the action catch is amazing. Toning down the bright whites to it’s right will help a lot. (One approach to that is to clone in similar texture and color using a ~20 density clone. Yes, removing the branches on both sides would also help, but that’s a lot of careful work.
An amazing catch, Debbie. I sure wish my Sony had that feature, but I’m not willing to spend the bucks for the latest version. @Ted_Forman and @Mark_Seaver have given you some excellent advice on the background. I don’t think removing the sticks would be much of a problem. The “remove” tool is pretty good. I might tone down the feet. While they probably were very bright, they are a bit of an eye magnet and distract from the rest of the bird. In a similar vein you could bring up the shadows on the head and neck of the heron a bit to accent that area. There’s a really slick way of doing that in LR where you use the object selection to select the bird and intersect that mask with a radial gradient to get a very smooth adjustment of the area you want.
I envy your experience that day. It must have been a total thrill. Hopefully you didn’t have to change memory cards too many times.
What a wild capture! The timing was perfect. I think I would burn in the bright area to the right of the heron but I might leave the branches on either side as is.
Hi Debbie,
Just here to say wow! I had to look at the shutter speed and ISO out of curiosity. Nice work and good advice above on removing distractions.
ML
Thank you so much @Ted_Forman@Mark_Seaver@Dennis_Plank@Youssef_Ismail and @Marylynne_Diggs - I’ve tried to apply your advice by burning the bright background to left and right of the heron and bringing up shadows in the face and neck. I also toned down the saturation and cleaned up the feet a bit. I already removed a lot of branches and am okay with the ones that remain. What do you think?
What a great image. Not much to add here. Great patients waiting for the bird to do something. I’ve only been a round a few herons, but they seem to act the same. Slow, slow, slow…then boom! And you got the Boom here. Nice work.
This inspires me to seek out more situations to practice ProCapture on the OM-1. The bird is beautifully frozen in mid-dive. Did it catch its intended prey?
I was on a trip with Nature Photo Retreats with 3 OM System ambassadors, it was great. I’d completely switched from Fuji to OM System back in October and was still new to ProCapture, we used it a lot in this workshop.
@Mike_Friel Yes it got the fish - I couldn’t get a good shot of the splash or the results from where I was. It all happened very fast once it let go of the branch…
My first reaction: this feels like too much—overall, heavily processed to the point where it’s hard to take seriously. I’d be curious to see the original RAW/JPEG so we have a clearer starting point.
