Trumpeter Swan Takeoff

[Mike Ferrara]

This is my first post here..critiques appreciated..Thank you

http://www.ferraraphoto.com/posts/SwanLo.jpg

Jackson,Wy Pond
5D MkII 600mm 1.4x TC
1/2000 f8 iso 250

[Manos Papadomanolakis]

welcome to BPN,
The light looks a bit harsh,beautiful pose...with nice wing position!

[Randy Stout]

Mike:

A big welcome to BPN! This is a great place to hone your skills.

Good sense of action here, with wing position, splashes.

The light is a mixed bag here. I really like the transillumination of the wings, but the light angle has left the near side of the bird in shadow, which is less than desirable. I think you could bring it up a bit in post processing. Certainly your ISO was low enough that noise shouldn't be too much of a problem.

To my eye the bird needs a bit of clockwise rotation.

Composition standpoint, I like the room on the left showing the splashes, but wish there was a bit more room to the right. That will tend to center the bird a bit more than desirable, but I think that might be your best compromise, since keeping the water splashes adds to the image.

The whites on the shoulder area are a bit hot.

Thanks for sharing, and look forward to more.

Cheers

Randy

[Phil Ertel]

Hi Mike,
Welcome to BirdPhotographers.net. I hope you find it as enjoyable and educational as I have. It is a great place to learn.

I like the action you capture. Randy has given you a good critique. I hope you don't mind but I took your image into photoshop and tried to implement his suggestions. I first added a bit of canvas on our right. I used techniques from Robert O'Toole's APTATS-1. I adjusted the color using a curves layer and equalizing the color channels to a neutral value in the image (the blue channel was showing a little clipping). I then increased the brightness using a separate curves layer by increasing the exposure about +1. I then selectively brightened the bird (masked out the areas I did not want brightened). To decrease the bright whites on the shoulder, duplicated the bird layer and converted the blending mode to linear burn (see the educational form for more details). I again created a mask for this layer to exposure just the areas I wanted the effect to be revealed. That is it. I am sure that you could do a better job of it with the original file at the conversion and then processing in photoshop. Again welcome and thanks for sharing.

[Arthur Morris]

Welcome. Excellent comments by Randy and Phil above. Unfortunately Phil's repost revealed that the image quality and sharpness is somewhat suspect. Was this a big crop? Was the image sharply focused?

[David Thomasson]

Welcome, Mike. Judging from the posted image, I suspect that you could get quite a bit more color and detail out of the full-size image. Nice job.

animated gif (500K) ...

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/3193/swan.gif

[arash_hazeghi]

Welcome to BPN. The pluses are wing position and take off pose and the minuses are rather soft bird and harsh light. TFS.

[Mike Ferrara]

Thank you for all of the very helpful comments. Phil..I appreciate the details of your adjustments (I ordered O Toole's Techniques) David...how did you do that Magic?? Arthur...that is full frame, I suppose the 5DMKII focusing is not designed for BIF (I now have a 7D) , I don't seem to get super sharp images with 600 & 1.4...maybe I need to have it checked out by CPS. I was looking for that translucent wing effect but without a flash was not able to nail the exposure.

[David Thomasson]

David...how did you do that Magic??

The editing? Or the animation?

[Mike Ferrara]

The editing

[David Thomasson]

The editing

The first and main thing is to mask off the swan so you can adjust it and the background separately. I used separate curves layers on each. When setting white point on the swan, it pays to experiment with a few different spots and different settings for the white dropper. To brighten some of the shadow details, I painted with white on a blank layer in soft light mode. Use about 10% brush opacity when doing that and build the effect up gradually.