Brown Pelican

[Michael Lloyd]

This is one of a pair of Brown Pelicans that were cruising the beach when I was there a few days ago. "There" is Mustang Island, TX near Corpus Christi, TX.

EOS 1D MKIII
600mm f4 IS hand held

1/1000 second
f4.5
ISO = 50

[Daniel Cadieux]

The light coming from behind-right has left the eye in shade - you may be able to lighten it during post-processing. I would also crop away the very top white band. Otherwise very pretty image, with a very active ocean feel to it that I like alot. I love the wave forming below in LLC :-)

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the BG and light and agree with Daniel regarding the eye and wish for better head/wing separation.

[Michael Lloyd]

I made an attempt at making the changes to the image. My PS skills are still developing (pun intended). I tried some of the techniques in ABP II. I'm not sure that I like the crop as well but I don't have the skills it would take to remove the breaking wave at the top of the image in CS. The ocean was very active. Wave height out past the 3rd cut was at least 6' when it's typically more like 2' - 3'.

[Michael Lloyd]

I don't know if this is ok to do or not but I had a couple of thoughts that I wanted to try out. The first is a B&W conversion from Nik Software Color Effex Pro 3.0 (hard to tell right? :D ). Might be a little too dark. B&W is not a strong suite of mine...

[Michael Lloyd]

The second is a graduated neutral density filter from Nik Software Color Effex Pro 3.0

[Michael Lloyd]

Sorry about posting another one but I didn't like what happened to the image between TIF and JPG. It lost some of what I did. Here's the same image (before the two filters) with a little Shadow / Highlight recovery. This is the last one for this thread...

[Daniel Cadieux]

Yep, much better. The composition is more pleasing and you brought out the eye nicely.