Wandering Tattler

[wendell westfall]

D70s 70-200VR+2X@400 1/1000 f/5.6 ISO400 0EV hand-held

I saw only three birds (a Whimbrel, a Gull and this guy) yesterday morning at a rocky inlet where I usually see many more. Since it is a first for me, I decided to post my Wandering Tattler photo. The image is cropped pretty heavily, but otherwise PPed minimally. How does it look?

Wendell

[Mark Young]

It's always good to see a shorebird. ;) The angle here is nice and low, but the heavy crop has unfortunately reduced the quality somewhat.
There seems to be some rings in the blue bg on the left, was that left over from cloning out something? For things like this I find that the spot healing tool works well. Just run the brush over the area a few times and it'll make those rings disappear.

[Harold Davis]

wendell, it looks as if you used noise reduction over the entire image. i think it might look better if you masked out the foreground and bird and only ran it on the bg. really lost a lot of detail. as is, i might crop a little more off the left to move the bird off center.

i might actually go back to the original and rework it completely!! the rocks are kinda interesting and the water looks good. i wonder what a "birdscape" not so heavily cropped might look like? wouldnt mind seeing the bird a little smaller in the frame if it helps eliminate running the NR so heavily. it's a cool looking bird and one i havent seen before!!

[DonaldNel]

I am bothered by what appears to me to be hard edged cloning stamps on the left side, above the end of the wing all the way to the edge. If they are actually naturally occurring, you'll want to soften the edges. Also, the bird appears soft, perhaps from the crop?

[Lance Peters]

HI Wendell - agree with the above comments - PP work needs some attention on this one, the Mr H might be correct less of a crop might be better here.
:)

[Bob Decker]

Some nice feather detail on the bird... plus lots of texture in the rocks. The one thing that a bit of side-lighting does is show texture. The touch-up on the LH side is very noticeable. I'm suspecting a healing brush.. but maybe clone. The bird almost gets lost against the rocks. I might be tempted to select and isolate the rocks then either lighten or darken them a bit to make the bird stand out a bit.

[Alfred Forns]

Just the crop Wendell These things really take a beating since any little imperfection just jumps out at you !!! As presented would try catching one with the head above the rocks for better view of the bill !!

[wendell westfall]

Thanks to all !!! Looks like a heavy crop and a clumsy attempt at removing four prominent water orbs from the background did me in. Another learning experience . . .