Variable Oystercatcher

[Paul Davey]

Variable Oystercatcher (Haematopus unicolor)

Fujifilm Finepix S5600, Aperture Priority mode, f/3.2, 1/280 sec, ISO 200, 10X optical zoom at 380mm, flash

Likes: composition, lighting, detail in eye, background
Dislikes: slight grain (noise), feet obscured by foreground rocks

Date: Friday 25 January
Location: Measly Beach at the mouth of the Tokomairiro River, Otago, New Zealand
Conditions: Sunset; minutes before lighting became too dark for photography, sun shrouded in clouds and sea breezes
Post processing: No cropping or editing yet

What do you think? My main worry is the feet chopped off by the foreground - an end to an otherwise good photograph in my opinion.

Paul

[Anita Rakestraw]

Paul, I think in this case the missing feet are fine - they are obstructed by something in the bird's environment; you didn't chop them off by your framing. You have also included the foreground area where the feet would be if the rocks were not in front of the feet. Maybe lighten/brighten the image up a bit and sharpen the bird a bit.

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Paul Agree with Anita Wold have been nice to see the feet but you did not cut them by any means Excellent pose light angle and bg Framing is really nice Would lighten a bit as suggested Difficult to get detail in that bird Excellent !!!!

[George DeCamp]

Paul,

Agree with the others here, no problem with the feet in my book either. In fact I am tempted to take a little more off the bottom to get rid of that out of focus rock that runs along the bottom. I think you could crop right to the peak of that oof rock and still have a strong image. Agree a little brighter would help here too!!

[Judd Patterson]

Paul, the angle here makes for a very interesting image. I feel as if I'm almost peering out of a hole in the rocks to view this bird. I don't mind the clipped feet because the low angle has given you a chance to include that blue sky that might have been absent with a higher angle. The biggest weakness here is the lack of detail in the feathers. I'd certainly give several recovery methods a try, including Fill in RAW conversion and a selection for the bird and then the Shadow/Highlight recovery tool. Fill flash might be in order the next time around!

[Paul Davey]

Hi Anita, Alfred, George, Judd

I am glad the obscured feet are not a major problem to some. Alfred, I was pretty lucky to get it in focus ;). 10 minutes later it would have been impossible without a tripod. In which case I took this handheld after doing a little stalking, low and slow across the sand to the rocks.

Ah yes, on closer examination it does need a little sharpening. Will wait until I make sense out of the sharpening tool included with the GIMP ;). I tried the crop suggestion to get rid of the foreground rock, looks good. Judd, technically I was using fill flash. Yet because I use a "compact" (some might like to call my model "semi-semi-DSLR") the different types of flash are more generalised. Presumably I was using the best flash it could perform in the puny little bulb.

Thanks all for the comments :)

Paul