Wood Duck Drake

[thomasryan]

Greetings,
This bird is a rare visitor here in the desert. The water on this pond isn't usually this clean, but the background was very bright. I added 2/3 to the exposure which I think helped the background but didn't do much for the whites. Thanks for looking...tom

50D 1/800 @f9 ISO 400 500mmf4 L +1.4x

http://members.cox.net/tgryan/Wood%20Duck%20IMG_7561a_4x6.jpg

[Colin Knight]

Beautiful bird! Well composed, and very sharp. However, I think it has a slight tilt to the right?

I have the 50D and hope to have the 500mm f/4 + 1.4x combo soon! Great to see nice results from it. How fast is the AF with the TC attached? Any good info you could give me would be nice....particularly something that would help me feel better about spending $5800 on some glass....=)

Colin

[Juan Aragonés]

It looks to me that this image has some kind of vertical distortion and I am not sure about the reason why. Maybe it is due to postprocessing or maybe I am wrong but it is easy for you to check it with the original. You have some clipped whites in the level 255 but not a noticeable amount of pixels.
I like the pose of the duck, the raised feathers of the head and the open beak. The low angle is nice and the eye contact too. In a perfect world, I would prefer a darker BG ;-)
BTW, some cloning job marks are visible at the left of the frame.

I toned down the BG a bit and increased the saturation in the bird, some level adjustment on the blacks and vertical distortion fix.

[Rene Quenneville]

I agree with Juan's review. This is a great picture but needs more attention to post processing. This kind of exposure calls for shadows and highlights in Photoshop rather that blowing the whites. A few minutes of work in the computer will make a great image out of it. Well done.

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Great comments from above. Love the wonderful alert pose in this one and the excellent color and detail. Thanks for sharing Thomas.