More yellowlegses!

[Jake Levin]

They're out in force, so all my fall bird pictures tend to be of the same species. When nature gives you a yellowlegs convention, I guess you go ahead and shoot it! I found this one bird standing on a river rock with some colourful moss, and I thought it was a nice complement to the bird's yellow (duh) legs. I did a bit of a crop from the top to remove some OOF blobs (probably more rocks), resulting in a wider ratio than I normally use, and removed one or two specular highlights in the water. Also ran my standard linear contrast, NIK detail extractor, and background noise reduction.

7D mkII, 500mm f/4 IS
1/400 @ f/5,6, ISO 400
ACR conversion, PS optimized

Thanks as always for your C&C! Let me have it :)
Jake

[Isaac Grant]

Nice pose and eye contact you have here. I like the rock and the colorful background as well. I would add a few points of black to the neutrals in selective color for the bird to give it more depth and bring out more of the deeper brown tones of juvenile yellowlegs. Bird looks a bit thin to me. The head does not look tack sharp to me and it seems that critical focus was more on the wings. Where was your focus point? I think the legs are a touch over saturated. Also I would change the crop and take some below away and add more to the top.

[Jake Levin]

Hi Isaac. Thanks for your tips! The focus point is actually bang on the eye and bill, so perhaps what you are seeing as a lack of sharpness stems from the fact that...I forgot to sharpen the actual image before posting it! I agree that adding black into the selective colour adjustment helps bring out the bird's brown tones, and taking out about five points of yellow from the hue/saturation adjustment layer is useful as well. No neon yellow legs on our yellowlegs.

The problem I see with adding more canvas up top is that I'd be content-aware filling in a big patch of green water, into a section of the picture that's already very green. What was originally cropped away is a long, OOF river rock that runs the length of the frame, and created a large and unflattering tan blob instead of a uniform background. As is it, some of the green up top was added using the fill function to replace the blob that was originally there. Nevertheless I'll try it out and see what develops.