Feather Maintenance

[Ted Willcox]

Subject: Belted Kingfisher [ Female ]
Camera: Canon EOS 1D MARK III
Lens: Canon 600 F4L IS
1/1600 at F6.3
ISO 1000
Location: Gabriola Island B.C.

[Lance Peters]

Love this - exposure looks great - BG is great, great detail- fantastic pose.

A little to tight LHS and could maybe use some CW rotation and I would sharpen the eye just a tad.

Nice work :)

[Daniel Cadieux]

I like the title :-) The preening pose is good and the feather pulled by the bill is neat. More room left and right would be needed, and to me the eye needs working...too glassy looking. See if you can lighten the dark areas above the head and under the wing a bit (not completely lighten, but not as dark as now).

[Desmond Chan]

Very good sharpness and details. Like the pose, too. Agreed that a bit more room both sides would be nice.

One thing, the image looks quite bright and the feathers very white on my monitor. It looks like the bird was lit by some artificial light. What kind of light the bird was shot under?

[Ramon M. Casares]

The light looks strange, although I like it very much, maybe kind of S/H style, still, the pose and exposure as BG and color are simply great a bit more room and you have yourself a TERRIFIC SHOT!! Big congratuaitons!

[Linda Robbins]

I really like the pose you have captured here...especially the tiny feather in the bill. I also notice the rather odd lighting in this image. The whites are a bit over, and I wonder if a S/H adjustment has caused this. In this very quick repost I have worked on the eye, added canvas to both sides, darkened the whites that were over a little and lessened the contrast a bit. This pose is worth taking some extra time in PS to improve it!

[Ted Willcox]

Thank you all for your interest, comments and suggestions and thank you Linda for the repost, looks great. I made this image from a blind with natural light. In optimizing, I added exposure, selecting out the whites, and for the most part the whites are good. I selected some darker areas and lightened them. I then added some contrast to the image. The bird look to blue so I did a color balance adjustment to get back to a more gray color. I, myself have never been totally happy with this image something odd about it. Having said that, I just love the way the feathers look on the underside of the out stretched wing. I apologize for getting back so late with this reply. I will try to improve it with more PS optimizing. Again thank you all. I hope I can extend the perch as well as you did Linda.
yours in wildness
Ted

[Mark Schmitt]

All that has been said about the image, as far as corrections, are useful. But might I make one other suggestion. As you mention, Ted, the bird appears a bit on the blue side of color values, and I agree with your critique. If the image was shot in RAW, you might want to go back to the original image and adjust the over-all white balance. It is non-losssy in RAW (won't loose data and can be done numerous time without degredation of original data). It looks to me that a value of approx 5100K to 5800K might warm it up a bit, depending on what your EXIF data of the original image was. That being said, the over-all image is very good, lots of interest and character. Well done.

[Ted Willcox]

Thanks Mark for the comment and suggestion. I will follow up on that.
Ted