Ready to land

[Juan Aragonés]

A flamingo maneuvering for landing facing the wing. Flaps on, undercarriage ready and asking for landing permission :)

C&C are always appreciated

Nikon D300 AFS Nikkor 500VR+1,4XTC, handolded, ISO800 f8 1/2000, manual exposure

[Lorant Voros]

Hola Juan,

Very nice pose, perfect exposure and very "frozen" position with great detail in the plumage. Colors are beautiful too. Pity for the bands. Congratulation for this great capture.

[Brian Barcelos]

Juan, The colors here are wonderful and I love the trailing legs. Exposure is great and lots of detail. I feel the head could use a little more sharpening. Congrats amigo.

Brian

[David Fletcher]

Clean and crisp Juan. Most unusual pose and must thank you for sharing that. (almost comical). Tack sharp and shows what the D300 in good light with good hands can do. (Oft shots at 800-1000 in poor light looking very disappointing and I have to remember it is the light quality, not the representation of the camera). VWD!

[Joe Senzatimore]

Outstanding quality in this image. Color,pose and detail all work together.

[Mital Patel]

mind blowing quality you have got here... what are those tags on the legs btw ?

[Tell Dickinson]

Hi Juan, very nice shot with good exposure control, I would personally like a bit more canvas on the right to take the bird out of the middle.

Tell

[Indranil Sircar]

Excellent Image, Juan. Love the pose, colors and the details on the feather.

[Michael Zajac]

Juan, Beautiful flight pose and wing details. Nice composition.

[denise ippolito]

Juan, Beautiful details and nice capture. I like the way the neck is bent, it adds interest to the image.Well done.

[Manos Papadomanolakis]

What a great flight shot,beautiful pose,light,head angle!!!

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi Juan,
You know I don't mind the comp tight......for me the neck position along with the rest.....including the split legs.......very nicely done!

[Arthur Morris]

Amazing SH and pose. With a perfect EXP. It would be a bit tricky to lose the bands--esp. the one on the far leg--but with your PS expertise it should not be too much of a problem if you choose to lose. I'd love to see this 1/2 again as wide as a pano. It needs more room in front--the bird is virtually centered from side to side--so you might as well go for the whole nine yards. If the framing is good for Mr. Curry-chek, you know that it is too tight for me <smile>

[Gal Shon]

fantastic! The BG color and the flamingo's match so well.
Light, colors, sharpness, pose are all superb, well done.
If anything, I would leave some more space to the right.

[Nicki Gwynn Jones]

Hi Juan,
Another vote for the tight crop...:D
Just love those feet...:cool:
Best,
Nicki

[Randy Stout]

Juan:

I love this pose. When I saw the thumbnail, I thought it must be a vertical that got rotated.

Lovely techs, another vote for more room to the right.

Randy

[Harshad Barve]

this is mindblowing image , loved everything of this:)
TFS

[Chris Kotze]

Super pose and beautiful colours, sharp and well exposed. Agree on some space on the RHS

[Arthur Morris]

When I saw the thumbnail, I thought it must be a vertical that got rotated. Randy

Hi Randy, Good to see you posting. Were you thinking that the bird was in flight when you were thinking it was a vertical???

[Juan Aragonés]

Thanks a lot for your comments and suggestions. Much apreciated

I agree that the bird is a bit tight in the frame (I would crop with more room at the right like several of you suggested) but the amount of detail in this image is so high that I wanted to go for a really tight image and at the end the bird resulted very centered.

Regarding the bands in the legs. Well I really did not mind for them because in Spain almost 30% of the flamingos are banded due to a very intense an long term bandind research program and bands in the wild flamingos are almost second nature. Of course it is really easy to clone out but I have other images of birds landing with no bands.

Regarding the performance of the D300 at ISO800 I am really happy with it and I overexpose my images about one stop because the quality of the files overexposed at 800 ISO is fantastic. When I convert the file in RAW I recover the exposure and the noise is really nice. That is the reason why I used ISO800 in this image. By the way, I am wondering why nobody asked about the high ISO with such a good light and the reason is simple. If I use ISO800 I can overexpose my images at f8 and enjoy shutter speed in the range of 1/1650s 1/2500s and that is absolutelly great for birds in flight because you can froze the action and get images that has a lot of potential in the dark room (specially if the images is highly contrasted).
At low light levels, ISO800 is not great but is better if you can overexpose and, I have to recognaisse, much better than in my beloved D2X. In this image, noise reduction filter was used only in the BG (beacuse it is part of my workflow, but really this image doesn´t need it a lot). There is not noise reduction on the bird and the dark areas are really clean for ISO800 in my opinion.

D300 is a great improvement in the Nikon lineup but the D3.... oops, I have been shooting with the D3 a couple of hours and it is hard to belive how good the files are at ISO 1000-2500, amazing! (I have several images of birds with the D3 in my blog if someone wants to have a look on it)

I have received a couple of PM asking for my workflow so I will try to post here the details later :-)

[Juan Aragonés]

:D:D:D

By the way, I forget to say that I like the idea of pano croping a lot, good suggestion :)

If the framing is good for Mr. Curry-chek, you know that it is too tight for me <smile>

</smile>

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Again Juan,

re:

I agree that the bird is a bit tight in the frame (I would crop with more room at the right like several of you suggested) but the amount of detail in this image is so high that I wanted to go for a really tight image and at the end the bird resulted very centered.

At the very least you could crop a bit from the back and add the same amount of canvas in the front. This would yield the same amount of detail with a slightly more pleasing COMP.

ps: I am glad that you liked the pano suggestion.

[Juan Aragonés]

My basic workflow is quite simple. I shoot RAW and I use Adobe RAW converter. Since I am shooting the D300 I tend to overexpose my images about one stop in order to get a better performance at high ISO (less noise in processing job).<o></o>
Open the RAW file in the converter, adjust the overexposure, noise/sharpening (sometimes I fix noise and sharpness in the RAW converter but in other cases I do that on CS4), a touch of saturation and save as a 16bit TIFF file.<o></o>
In CS4 I can add additional rounds of noise reduction or/and sharpening selectively. To do that I work using at least two layers: in the upper layer I made a selection of the bird and delete it then I run noise reduction. This way I can get a noise free BG without affecting the details of the bird. In the lower layer I work on the sharpness.

Hope this helps.<o>

The settings of my D300 for birds in flight can be found here: http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=43648
</o>

[Stu Bowie]

Brilliant IQ Juan, and this is all about the light. The colours look perfect to me, and overall sharp. I would maybe take a bit off the top, and add to the right. Congrats on an outstanding image.

[arash_hazeghi]

Wow!!!
This is one impressive shot. Congrats!

BTW, if you overexpose 800 by one stop wouldn't this be ISO 400 at 0EV? Is there an advantage of 800 + 1EV versus 400 0EV (shutter speed will be equal):confused:

[Gyorgy Szimuly]

Awesome flight image Juan. I see no problem with plastic rings. The pose is very cool and unique.
Nice details and colors.

Szimi

[Juan Aragonés]

Arash, do not ask me why because I am not very good with those kind of technical details :D. I just can say that the exposure is not the same and you can try by yourself with your camera. Hope this helps and I apologize for delay in responding to your question :)


Wow!!!
This is one impressive shot. Congrats!

BTW, if you overexpose 800 by one stop wouldn't this be ISO 400 at 0EV? Is there an advantage of 800 + 1EV versus 400 0EV (shutter speed will be equal):confused:

[Arthur Morris]

BTW, if you overexpose 800 by one stop wouldn't this be ISO 400 at 0EV? Is there an advantage of 800 + 1EV versus 400 0EV (shutter speed will be equal):confused:

Hi Arash, While I am no technical expert either there is a huge advantage to working at ISO 800 at +1 instead of ISO 400 at zero; there will be much less noise in the former image than in the latter, and the image quality will be far better. Yes, the shutter speeds will be the same but when you lighten the underexposed image created at ISO 400 you will be introducing noise. Your histogram will not have any data in the highlight box on the right....

[Randy Stout]

Artie:

Glad to see that the bears didn't get you!

Welcome back.

Randy