Standing tall

[John Goldman]

Adult Bald eagle.
5DMkIII, 500mm+1.4TC, 1/640sec, f6.3, ISO 1600, window mount, Av mode.

[Doug West]

The exposure looks spot on to me John, I wouldn't change a thing. The head angle is good.

The only thing I'd play around with is the crop. The vertical crop is the right way to go.
But I'd start my left hand crop so that branch sticking out from the left isn't there. From
the bottom, crop it a little below that first knot on the branch the eagle is perched on. The
right hand side could probably be left as is, except I'd remove that branch in the upper
right hand corner.

Doug

[Warren Spreng]

Excellent! Seems like every time I go to shoot one of these magnificent birds they like to perch well above me, look down and laugh at me as though they are saying, "I know you want me on a lower perch with no branches in the way!"

[John Goldman]

Thank you, Doug, for your input. I tried a crop to remove the branch sticking out from the left. For me, it made the bird too tight in the frame. I will remove the branch in the right hand corner.

[Diane Miller]

Wonderful shot with great detail in whites! I like the BG forest detail. The branch n the UR will be easy to remove. The large one on the left is a problem. Do you have any more image there or was this full frame? I agree that cropping from the left would make it too crowded. But you might be able to remove that branch fairly easily with Content Aware fill. You might have to clone out the four smaller ones touching it to get a good result, but worth trying both ways.

I also touched up a bit of a red cast. Probably went too far, but just to show it.

[steve torna]

I like Diane's re-post crop but I like the color of the original better. Diane did mention that she probably took a little too much red out. I think you did a magnificent job with this bird. Nice exposure, detail in whites and blacks, and well saturated colors and background. Although the background has lots of stuff in it, it works for me because most of it is softly OOF and puts the eagle in context. Good job! TFS

[Diane Miller]

I just pulled it to look at it again and see now that the original is tagged with Adobe RGB. I obviously didn't notice that before. Some browser and monitor combinations will show the colors incorrectly if an image isn't in sRGB and tagged as such (profile embedded.) Here's another take, just use the Hue-Sat dialog to bring down saturation on the red quite a bit and move the hue slightly to the right -- a move I use when faces photograph too red. The repost is converted to sRGB and tagged.

See my tutorial in Educational Resources about posting to the web.

[Sandy Witvoet]

Magnificent pose. Excellent exposure. I'm pretty much ok with the branches... other than the one that seems to be growing out of the back of his head. LOVE that face!

[Stuart Philpott]

John to have the detail shown here on the white in a dark bird is something I find so hard. I think this is incredible John such a magnificent bird anyway background is subtle and placement in frame also works for me
All in all something to aspire to take for me John, simply put a corker!!!

take care

Stu

[John Goldman]

Thank you, Diane, for your comments and re-post. Nice job eliminating the vertical branch behind the bird. Now your re-post shows that twig coming out the back of his head more prominently. I'm sure you're not happy with that, neither am I.

[John Goldman]

Thank you all for your comments, criticisms and encouragement.

[Diane Miller]

Thank you, Diane, for your comments and re-post. Nice job eliminating the vertical branch behind the bird. Now your re-post shows that twig coming out the back of his head more prominently. I'm sure you're not happy with that, neither am I.

That one does need to be fixed -- it's too difficult to get good results with a small JPEG so I decided to just leave it at that. That one is a very easy fix, though. That upper corner was starting to look awfully empty and I was considering just cloning out the part that went in front of the trunk, to make it look like it came from behind it. Maybe leave all those smaller branches in that corner and try to just remove the large one.

[John Goldman]

That one does need to be fixed -- it's too difficult to get good results with a small JPEG so I decided to just leave it at that. That one is a very easy fix, though. That upper corner was starting to look awfully empty and I was considering just cloning out the part that went in front of the trunk, to make it look like it came from behind it. Maybe leave all those smaller branches in that corner and try to just remove the large one.

I did clone out part, in front of the trunk, of the twig growing from the head so it looks like it is behind the trunk.