Tim, this is a neat shot. The B&W works perfectly with the egret. I like the wide crop to show environment. The side-pose of the bird is nice, whites are really good, and interesting grasses.
Fine work!
This is quite nice, Timothy. I’m not absolutely sure about the darkness of the background, but it may well reflect reality. The egret is very well handled.
The egret seems to be sharp and to have nicely handled whites but there is not much interest in the BG – either for shapes or, more importantly, for tonalities – the BG is very tonally flat. I don’t know what you did, or how you converted to B/W. Can you tell us how you did that conversion? It is a key to what might be possible for improvement.
In addition to changing how you converted, you could go back to the raw file and carefully increase contrast in the BG tonalities without blowing out the whites, but that may take some careful masking, with modifications to any sort of “auto” masking. (It’s just not there yet…)
Thank you Dennis: In this situation the bird was about 6 stops brighter than the back ground which required exposing accordingly, a different exposure would not have revealed any more detail in the back ground.
Hello Diane: The bird was about 6 stops brighter than the back ground,exposing for the bird caused the back ground to dark. to answer you question, this is a jpeg, in fact I have never taken a raw image. I this situation manipulating the back ground would not have revealed any more detail.
Tim, don’t be afraid to start shooting in RAW. You’ll have a lot more options in processing. As Diane suggested, choose the “Raw + Jpeg” setting so you have both to work with, while you learn about RAW files. You can later delete the duplicate files, when you’re comfortable with RAW alone.
The egret looks good in black and white and you have a nice pose. A tighter crop would give more emphasis on the egret, yet still show the environment.
