Purple Swamphen

[Glenn Pure]

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Something a little different for the monthly theme: bird peek-a-boo above the long grass. This is one of the Rallidae and is common in Australia and New Zealand. Normally around water but when in New Zealand in early 2017, I saw many in open grassy paddocks searching for meals. This one taken at Smugglers Cove on the North Island of New Zealand. This is about two thirds of the frame area. I've cloned a single pesky dark grass stem out next to the bird.

Thank you for looking and for any comments you are kind enough to share.

Technical: Canon 80D with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/640 sec, f8, ISO 640. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 3, crop, lighting adjustments, NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Modest NR to bird and stronger NR to background. Selective adjustments to bird (reduce shadows, add midtone contrast) and eye (reduce shadows). Bird only sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian Blur: 0.6 pixels at 50%) after final size reduction.

[Randy Stout]

Glenn:

This is very striking, like the peek-a-boo pose, the soft grasses, reds.

Are you using the NR because of actual noise? Surprised at this ISO that it would be an issue unless underexposed.

Cheers

Randy

[Glenn Pure]

Are you using the NR because of actual noise? Surprised at this ISO that it would be an issue unless underexposed.


Noise not really an issue but a bit of NR esp on the background with Neat Image always improves with the bonus of dropping the file size on final save. Even a little noise will mess with the jpg compression and blow out the file size. If you want to know more about my logic here, I posted this some time back. Sorry, it is rather long.

http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/141371-Workflow-for-(Canon)-cameras-with-small-pixels

[Juan Tolentino]

Yes, different. I think that since we can only see the head, neck and very little from the body the bird looks too small in the frame. I'm not sure but maybe a CW rotation may be beneficial? Thank you for sharing Glenn and for commenting on my pictures and others, always enjoyable.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Glenn, a perfect perspective for the monthly theme, and what a great HA too. Well exposed on the colours here, great eye, and I've always liked these type of images where the BG blends into the surrounding BG.

[Jonathan Ashton]

It works for me too, I like the fine detail and the composition, colours look great. Quite a bill he has there, he has a varied diet so I bet he makes short work of whatever he's eating.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Love it! Just enough FG blur. Good comp as well. The subject looks great! The yellows of the BG and FG are a bit too prominent IMO. I was not there obviously, but I find mt Canon tends to bump up the yellows when photographing grassy BGs. Here I used PS Selective Color, chose the yellow channel, and added the cyans by 35 points and reduced the yellows by the 35 points as well.

[Glenn Pure]

Many thanks to you all for your comments and for your repost, Daniel. A few issues have been raised.

The colour: well, I really don't have a good recollection but NZ was looking very lush and green while we were there. Was it more yellow-green than green-green? Not sure. So I guess go with what looks best.

Rotation: I did think about doing that. I had no frame left at the bottom and would have had to do a canvas extension with any significant CW rotation. Simple enough but I usually try to avoid. In any event, this was a case where the bird was angled to me and so the pose is probably close to accurate and not a case of camera tilt causing the result. Always a dilemma in these cases whether to correct for perception or go with the reality of the scene.

Tighter crop: I'm aiming for a smaller in the frame shot here to emphasise the bird in a sea of OOF green grass so did not go tighter. But a tighter crop could easily work albeit with a different objective and outcome.

[Glenn Pure]

It works for me too, I like the fine detail and the composition, colours look great. Quite a bill he has there, he has a varied diet so I bet he makes short work of whatever he's eating.

Hi Jon, they do have a varied diet apparently - and not always loved for that because they will predate other waterbird nests too.

[Randy Stout]

Glenn:

I like the loose crop for this type of shot.

Randy

[Juan Tolentino]

I like the repost with the yellow removed and I was curious to see how it look with a little rotation. I hope you don't mind. I did something quick, it may need some details corrected.

[Glenn Pure]

Many thanks Juan for your repost. Below is my version, starting with the original TIFF and reprocessing. I haven't taken the green background quite as far as Daniel's RP since reviewing it again, I thought it was actually a little too blue/cyan.

173704