The Morning Stroll

Image Critiques Avian Critiques
1

Black-necked Stilt
Black-necked Stilt3903×2585 829 KB

  • Hello, this is my first post I’m excited to join this community! This is a Black-necked Stilt I spotted taking an early morning stroll.
    *Hand held, Nikon D7000, Sigma 150-600c lens
  • 1/1250, f8.0, iso 800, 480mm
  • Basic touch-ups in LR (cropping, exposure, highlights, etc.)
    *Looking for any feedback at all.
2

Welcome to NPN and the Avian forum, Wes. This is a very good first post. Exposure on the stilt looks good as does the focus and I really like the pose and head turn. It’s always difficult to judge the physical constraints from an image, but the bright waves in the image seem to pull my eye and I think you could have alleviated that if it were possible to get a lower angle which would tend to smooth the look of the water (see Hans Overduin’s work for excellent examples). The land in the lower left also tends to compete with the bird, but I don’t know if you had any way of avoiding it. Lastly, the background seems rather noisy and I think some noise reduction on it would help a lot.

This is still a very fine image and I look forward to seeing more of your work and your comments on other’s images.

3

Welcome, Wes. I’m new here too and immensely enjoying the company. Good advice above, and I would add that it would be good to explore a composition in “portrait” format as well, as it would fit this subject. I’m having excellent noise reduction results with Topaz DeNoise AI. The default parameters work very well. Do it on a copy layer and if it feels slightly overdone just reduce the opacity of the layer a little. It is best done on the image right out of the raw converter, where noise is most evenly distributed before any retouching. You get some free subtle sharpening, too.

4

Very nice first post Wes. Lots of good advice already given. For this particular photo I like the idea of a vertical crop which would take out most of the water and foreground rocks. The rest of the rocks could be cloned out. Also you might do a bit of selective lightening around the eye area.
I really like the nice pose with the slight head turn and well done on the exposure. It is a tough one with both whites and blacks.

5

Thanks for the feedback Dennis. That’s a good tip regarding the water reflection; I was crouching down, but will consider dropping a bit lower next time to reduce some of the brightness of the water. Cheers!

6

Thanks for the welcome message and feedback, Diane. I have only heard positive things about Topaz. I will look into it.