Pelican in bad light. Is there hope for this?

[Joaquin Barbará]

Capture this pelican shooting into the sun. It was the only place I could stand.
Did my best to make it presentable.
All ideas are welcome including "It is hopeless!!"
Thank you in advance.

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Nikon D 7100
Nikon 300 mm f/4 + 1.4 TC
f/5.6
ISO 3200
SS 1/2500
ISO 3200

[Joaquin Barbará]

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[Joaquin Barbará]

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[Sandy Witvoet]

You did a great job of pulling details out! IMO.... Might be nice to see this bird in the ULC a bit, as if it's "flying in"... a little CCW rotation... I like the LR adj best.

[Joaquin Barbará]

Sorry Sandy, can't figure out what ULC stands for.

[Doug West]

I think you have a few options with this.

One would be to just darken the pelican and turn in it into a silhouette. Then play
with some different colors for the sky. Also move the pelican a little to the left so
its not centered. Also, straighten the horizon a little.

Another option is to do all of the above, but remove the water entirely as it flies
across a sunrise/sunset type of sky.

Doug

[Douglas Bolt]

Making the image darker appeals to me. Levels and vignette.

[Joaquin Barbará]

Thanks Doug that looks great.

[John Chardine]

Hi Joachin- ULC = Upper Left Corner, so Sandy is recommending a recrop- I agree. Sometimes it works to have the subject exiting from the short side of the image or even the middle, but often it's best to give more space in the direction of travel.

I like the nice yellow light. You could really push this image in an artistic direction as Douglas has done. Attached is an intermediate version. I retouched the wing a little to remove the gap in the feathers, which was jumping off the page with the darker rework.

[Joaquin Barbará]

John how did you create more space on the R side of the frame?

[John Chardine]

Hi Joachin- Sorry, I should have mentioned that.

For this sort of thing I use Photoshop CC but CS6 also has the ability. First I used the crop tool to add some extra space there. You can also use Image->Canvas size to do the same thing. I then used the Magic wand tool to select the blank space I had just created to the right (one click). Finally, I used Edit->Fill Content-aware to fill the space. Ps does an amazing job on an image like yours with little if any need to touch-up afterwards. Looking at what I did, I should have used the Clone tool to remove any hint that the Content-aware fill copied from another part of the image. Let me know if this is clear.

[Sandy Witvoet]

Sorry Sandy, can't figure out what ULC stands for.
Sorry, Joaquin.... ULC: Upper Left Corner.... as John has somewhat positioned it. Would like to see a comp of John's positioning and Doug's silhouette!

[Diane Miller]

A level horizon should always be something to catch -- unless you're going for an artistic impression, and then it should be off enough to look intentional. You could go in several directions here, as you have seen. I assume you didn't go further left with the Shadows slider because it brought out noise at ISO 3200. So you could just say this is OK because it is what I could do. Some years from now as you shoot more birds you may get similar but better shots and delete this one, but for now I wouldn't call it hopeless.

If you're using Lightroom's keywording, which is very flexible and easy to use, you can do one click on the arrow to the right of your keyword for Brown Pelican and see all of them you have shot, and easily delete any you no longer want -- no matter what drives or folders they are spread across. (If the drive isn't online, you would need to power it up.)

There might be some detail to be found in the bird using something like Topaz Detail or Nik's Detail Extractor, but those will also increase noise.

[Jim Keener]

Something like this is what I had in mind when I first saw the image. It takes advantage of the dramatic full wing spread, and the backlit bird. Drama. And a sense of solitude. Congratulations, Joaquin, on persevering in the face of adversity.