Roseate Spoonbill at Sunset

[Juan Tolentino]

I captured this image last year at Fort DeSoto Park, Florida, with the Nikon D750 Handheld and AF-S Nikkor 200-500mm 1-5.6E ED VR
ISO 1600
f5.6
1/250
500mm
Manual Mode
Processed on LR and PS.
Crop <50%


All C & C's will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for looking

JT

[Alex Becker]

Wow Juan -- killer image. Love the details, pose, colors of the bird and BG. I might be tempted to very slightly tone down the yellows a bit in the bottom right hand corner but really no complaints with this image. TFS

[Marina Scarr]

What a unique spoonie image. Love the colors and details. Did you by any chance use fill flash here?

[Adhika Lie]

Wow, looks so good with that background. The sunset color matches the bird itself. Yeah, I am wondering about the use of fill flash, too. It looks really great, though!

[Isaac Grant]

This is killer. So nice and different. Sunset in the back works extremely well. The only thing that I think is not perfect is the dark area on top of the birds body and especially that horizontal streak. I find it pulls the eye from the rest of this excellent image. I did the following steps in PS and it took maybe 2 minutes at most.

Select the bird only. If you are going to do other work then it helps to save the selection and name it bird or spoonbill or whatever.
Open a new layer (contol J on a PC) go back to the background layer and clone using the left side of the image as the source. Can go right over the "bird" as the selection is on its own layer now. Will get a really clean job without having to be careful about touching the bird.
Applied NR to background layer only
If doing other work then flatten the image and load the selection again and continue to do your work on it. Keep in mind that I was not 100% careful with my selection and may have gone over the feathers on the back of the head a bit. Just showing as an example with the dark area removed.

[Bill Dix]

Wow. This has Florida Travel Poster written all over it. Killer colors and detail. Isaac's repost helps; looks better without that dark area. Very nicely seen and captured.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Jeepers, the colours are so appealing!! Well balanced crop. Very nice overall, and I do like what Isaac has done to that area he worked on.

[Juan Tolentino]

Thank you Issac for making the image better and for the explanation, I'll go back in the PS's history before the cropping to make the change.

Marina, Adhika,

No fill flash used, I applied the dodge and burn technique as explain in Artie's digital basics to make the image brighter where needed. Thank you all for the comments, I really appreciated and also inspire me to keep trying to improve with your help.

[Chris R. Johnson]

Spectacular image. Really vibrant colors.

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

Beautiful Bird and Awesome vibrant colors.

I like the repost...

Thank you for sharing.

[Jim Crosswell]

Stunning image Juan! I like the pose, complimentary colours, IQ, sharpness and composition.

[David Salem]

This is fantastic!! Love the colors, details and comp. Isaac's re-post looks great. This would make a nice print. Well done

[stuart wanuck]

lovely coloring nice portrait prefer second rendering

[gail bisson]

I don't comment very often anymore but I have to say that this is a wonderful image Juan. Love the color palette and the fact that this is NOT flashed.
Nice and sharp and I really like the comp and the perfect head angle and the POV. The repost takes it up a n otch but the OP is still excellent.
I think this is worthy of IOTW!
Gail

[Glenn Conlan]

You have a winner! Unbelievable image, the colors are beautiful with superb light

[Juan Tolentino]

Thank you again guys, I'm truly humble by the comments. All I have to say is that I'm really glad that I decided to join the Fort DeSoto's Instructional Photo Tour with Artie less than a year ago, since, contrary to what I thought at the moment, I didn't have a clue about bird photography or post proccessing when I got there. I'm also glad that I joined the BPN forum, where I learn something new everyday. Still a long way to go, but reading articles from Arash, visiting the forum and Artie's blog everyday to try to improve.

You guys are the best!! Happy shooting!!

[Tomasz Zawadzki]

Fantastic image.

[Juan Tolentino]

Thank you again guys, I finally found the time to make the cleanup suggested by Issac.