Drying off

[wendell westfall]

D70s 70-200VR+2X@400 1/1600 f/5.6 ISO400 0EV Hand-held

Caught this Stilt taking a bath this morning. After numerous dips, spreading water all over itself, the bird jumped up and flapped its wings to dry them. As you can see, I did not catch it completely up in the air, unfortunately. The image is presented almost full frame, but tweaked a bit, including NR and sharpening.

Wendell

[Lance Peters]

Hi wendell - like the pose, good HA and eye contact.
Seems to have a green colour cast on my screen. A lower shooting angle would have put this over the top.

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Wendell One sweet image to capture and full frame at that !!!

Find these difficult and always give them room for jumping and doing the unexpected !!! Would like to see the bird a little further back in frame ... can add canvas up front ... just a little will do.

btw the main thing I see is a halo around the bird ... probably from shadow/highlight !!!

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Wendell,
I like the capture, agree with the techs. given. I too would like to see the bird placed back in the frame and more canvas added...looking forward to more...:cool:

[denise ippolito]

Wendell, Cute pose and I agree w/ all advice given.Nice capture.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Wendell: IMO a vertical orientation called for. The halo around the bird tells a tale. I would conjecture that you underexposed the image. Assuming you use photoshop, you then used shadow/highlight filter, and not only did you get a halo, but noise. The horror! At ISO 400, if you slightly overexposed the image, using an exposure compensation of +1 for example, you would have avoided the problem. Anyway, to reduce the halo effect, do your adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to adjusting overall exposure, you can use the recovery slider to tone down the whites, fill light slider to lighten the shadows or dark areas, or use the curves graph.Thus you can reduce the halo and other ill effects that may very well show up if you do the same thing in photoshop itself. You probably know this already, but any adjustments in ACR done to an image are placed in a sidecar file, with the same name as the file, except have an .xmp format. This is also read when you open the image in Photoshop. Don't like the adjustments? Delete the .xmp file.
Hope I've been helpful. regards~Bill

[wendell westfall]

Bill, I think you are right on both counts: orientation and exposure. However, it is almost full frame and I had very little "extra space" (but enough!) to work with. As for exposure it was underexposed. I tend to do that too often, probably overly fearful that I will blow out the whites in an image. Incidentally, I shoot in RAW and make most of my adjustments in Lightroom where they are, as I'm sure you know, completely non-destructive and can be "erased" at any time. Sometimes I additionally go to PSElements, which I did in this case. I fear the Stilt is not as sharp as it could have been right out of camera, and I got a bit too aggressive in trying to make it "better." Appreciate you input . . .

[Dave Phillips]

I agree with most of the above and also note that this is in ProPhoto colorspace,
an extremely wide gamut and not to be used for web display. For ALL to see
your interpretation correctly, you must "CONVERT", not assign eRGB colorspace.

This is what ProPhoto looks like in non color managed browser......dull and mudddy.
You are not alone here Wendell, I see images every day here not converted to sRGB

[wendell westfall]

Well, Dave, I'm getting out of my league with "colorspace" matters. But I checked the Export function in my Lightroom program and note that the color space default setting for exporting jpg files to any place is ProPhotoRGB. There are, however, two other options listed, sRGB and Adobe RGB(1998). I simply use the default. As you know, Lightroom is non-destructive and as I understand it images cannot be converted in the program before Export. But, to repeat, I am way beyond my knowledge-level in these matters. Thanks for your observation; perhaps I will investigate further.