Black-bellied plover

[allanrube]

I went to the beach late in the afternoon yesterday instead of early morning. 97% of the birds were least sandpipers or semi-palmated plovers. I did find a few others, however. Here is a black-bellied plover that was feeding in the area where the tide had gone out. Lots of colors.
D300 400 VR 1.7 tc.

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/356815201_teLm2-L.jpg

[Doug Brown]

Great low angle with nice light and sharpness. Love the FG and near BG too. I wish the demarcation in the far BG wasn't passing through the bird's head. Varying your height slightly relative to the bird would have moved the line. But it's still a very nice photo. Thanks for posting!

[Mike Milicia]

Love the low angle, beautiful colors, great light, and sharp detail !
Very nicely done !

[joel quenneville]

Great pose, colors and lighting! Even though it breaks the "shoot at the birds eye level" rule, I believe that raising the camera to get a clean background would strengthen the composition by removing a distraction and emphasising the wonderful colors in the beach and BG. Otherwise this is an excellent image. Keep them coming.

[allanrube]

I have spent some time getting rid of the dark, upper background, but without success. I tried quick mask techniques.

[Taylor Yeager]

Colors set this apart for me. Very nice.

[Arthur Morris]

Love the colors, the alert pose, and the sharpness, but not the dark line through the head. The image would benefit from a 1 degree clockwise rotation.

I spent about 30 minutes moving the dark strip up with QMs and the Clone Stamp and accidentally closed the image without saving it after it was looking pretty good. Could have done much better with all the pixels but doing it well would have been a lot of work...

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great angle, details, light and pose. The line has been mentioned, a slightly higher angle might have helped.

[allanrube]

Thanks for working on the image Artie, even though it did not get saved. I have been working on it and at least I know you think it would take a lot of work.

A higher angle might have helped with the line but would have destroyed the level with bird.

[Doug Brown]

Here's a quick fix to the line problem.

[Arthur Morris]

Way well done. Please share. You forgot the rotation <smile>

[allanrube]

Yes, Doug, please share. You did a great job on a common problem.

[Doug Brown]

I used the quick select tool to select the bird's head and neck. I copied the selection to a new layer. Then I went back to the BG layer and selected the brush tool. I found representative colors and painted them in the dark band. Took 3 minutes maximum.

[allanrube]

Thanks Doug. I will give this a try on my image this afternoon. I have never tried this before - any suggestions on brush size. mode, opacity - anything else?

[allanrube]

I worked on it for about 5 minutes. By rotating the image I had to crop closer.

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/358303127_vJwmQ-L.jpg

[Doug Brown]

How do you like the technique?

[allanrube]

I like it but need to practice. Your version came out much better, but at least I now do not have the line going through the head. Thanks.