Wood Duck in Flight

[Amanda Reed]

Taken at North Chagrin Reservation last weekend. I was participating in a workshop lead by Matthew Studebaker. Thanks Matthew for a great weekend and many thanks to Randy Stout for answering my questions, sharing tips and giving me encouragement!

Nikon D300
Nikon 200-400 f/4
ISO 800
f 5.6
1/500th sec

[William Malacarne]

Like the bird verey much...I feel the ripples in the water need a CCW rotation.

Bill

[Randy Stout]

Amanda:

Lovely colors here, good timing on the shot, nice wing spread.

I find that for flight shots, I need a faster shutter speed, perhaps 1/1000 at minimum. I know you were concerned about the ISO, but better a sharp image with a little noise, which can usually be fixed, versus a slightly blurry picture, without noise, that can't be fixed!

I did a couple of tweaks. Selective sharpening of eye, head body and feet. Left wings alone. Burned in a few brighter spots on legs. Dodged the head a bit to bring up the color a small amount. Burned in a few of the brighter spots in the water, which I found just a touch distracting.

The image needs to be rotated just a bit CCW (about 2 degrees would be about right). I did a trial on this, but it cuts out enough canvas, that the cropping would be too tight. Hopefully you have a bit more canvas to work with.

Overall, very nice image. Thanks for the kind words. Hope to see more images soon.

Randy

[Dan Brown]

Beautiful bird and BG Amanda! I felt that this needed a bit of leveling, so in my repost, I copied Randy's repost, rotated it about 2.9 degrees CCW and then cropped. The crop is a little tight but the rotation seems to have leveled the waters surface. I repositioned your copyright also.

[Amanda Reed]

Thanks to you both... love the improvements... now I'll have to try to recreate what you've done so I'll know how to do it next time :-)

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Amanda

Excellent landing pose, I hope you had the motor humming for the next few to catch the landing. Agree on the rotation and might just reduce saturation, it is just personal taste but looks over. For my taste even my re post is a little over. Tech wise don't worry much about shooting wide open, the extra shutter speed would have been good here or go the other way for a killer blur !!!

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Amanda,
I like this capture in the landing position, the head angle is good and you have a sharp eye, I like the semi-blur wing action...I agree with the good comments given, and Mr. Forns repost puts it over the top, with the more natural color rendition...looking forward to your next one...:cool:

[Amanda Reed]

Thanks Al and Gus for the feedback. Believe it or not the true colors that day were more like what Randy did... amazing reflections on the pond from all of the trees packed with fall leaves. Now that the weather is turning cold in New England, I better settle in with Photoshop... I've got a few techniques to master :-)