Kingfisher (Alcedo Atthis) in flight

[Bretoteanu Dan]

Hy, this is a grab shot shot of a kingfisher taking of toward the nest. Techs were Canon 1DX mk. I+100-400 mk. II, f 7.1 SS 1/5000, Jobu tripod and gimbal. It was more of a grabshot, even at 1/5000 my reaction time lacked, but maybe next time I'll do better. PP in DPP 4.12.20.3, increased exposure by 1.33, adjusted the orange saturation +1, luminance noise set at 2 and chrominance noise at 4, full frame. Converted into jpeg directly from raw, then applied +1 sharpening to it before posting.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Not bad at all details look pretty good as do the colours. I appreciate you are limited with DPP but if you could make branch a little less bright - I think there are now adjustment brushes in DPP from what I remember.

[Andreas Liedmann]

Hi Dan ... the subject is really nice with the stretched wings and the look to the side .

The very dominant log is a real " killer " for the image IMHO . You can , with very limited options , tone it down in DPP but it will stay .

Colors are looking quite nice , if this were mine I would lower the HL and give the image a tiny bit more depth via the gamma slider i.e. + 15 - 20 . Not sure what you mean by " applied +1 sharpening to it before posting . You can apply it straight away ... as there is only one round of sharpening available in DPP . Unless you use the DLO option , then you apply two rounds of sharpening basically !!! And you need to go higher with the sharpness to get a decent sharpness in the output file . At least set it to +3
If you have to increase the exposure by 1.33 .... then you have created a file that is not ideal to work with IMHO . A good idea would be to learn how to shoot ETTR ( expose to the right ) .... push the histogram as far as possible to the right without blowing the HL to extend the dynamic range for more detail in the darker parts . Later in the raw process you can drop exposure to get the detail back into the lighter tones .

TFS Andreas

[William Dickson]

Nice colours on the bird with a good flight pose...I'm afraid this one aint working for me because of the dominant perch and the bird flying away from us.

Will

[John Mack]

Just a moment too late. Would burn that perch down some. I like the fish.

[arash_hazeghi]

too bad he is flying away from us, image is also too small for critique can't see much details


TFS

[Bretoteanu Dan]

Thank you for your comments Andreas. Not much I could about the log, a friend set it up. What I meant about sharpening before posting was that I converted the raw file, which had the sharpness set at the default value of 3, into a jpeg. Then I sharpened the so obtained jpeg with+1. I could try and sharpen the jpeg with +3 though I think it would make it look too "crunchy". I could try to convert the raw (with sharpness at 3) to tiff and then convert the tiff into jpeg, though I noticed that when I tried this the resulting jepg always looked oversharpened. Youa are rigt about the exposure, it was underexposed because I was caught offguard, I'm trying to learn ETTR.

[Bretoteanu Dan]

Not much I could do about the trajectory Arash, but I have caught him in a better position, wil post that at some time. About the image being too small, that's how DPP allows me to save it. If I try to save at 1920 px the file exceeds 600 kb, so I tried to save it at 1200 but still was too big, so it allowed me only 1125X750.

[Bretoteanu Dan]

I think the fish would strongly disagree, had he had that posibility:S3:. And you are right, it was a moment too late, but maybe if the emergency state is lifted I could give it another try.

[arash_hazeghi]

Not much I could do about the trajectory Arash, but I have caught him in a better position, wil post that at some time. About the image being too small, that's how DPP allows me to save it. If I try to save at 1920 px the file exceeds 600 kb, so I tried to save it at 1200 but still was too big, so it allowed me only 1125X750.

you can def post 1920 pixel wide like the rest of us, you need to resize in photoshop and use the "save for web feature" to bring the files size below 600KB