White Pelican Portrait

[Dawn Currie]

Shot on a rare overcast day in central Florida (Jetty Park to be exact). The pelicans love hanging out along the rocks, but you usually can't get anything but their backs. I patiently observed them looking for just the right opportunity and this is the result.

Technical data: Canon 450D,ISO 200, 500mm mirror lens, 1/90 sec, full-frame composition

[William Malacarne]

Dawn

Good eye contact and feather detail. You handled the background well. I would prefer to see more of a crop off the bottom due to some of his tail being cropped off already. Make it more into a portrait. Also I think this is a Brown Pelican.

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/brown_pelican/id

Bill

[Dawn Currie]

Bill, I appreciate your help. I'm still learning about birds, so I often misidentify them. Thanks for the very useful link! I also tried a closer crop and cloned some of the rock to give more room over his head (and to put the ROT spot at the top of the beak, right between the eyes). I think you'll be pleased with the result. Regards, Dawn

[Maureen Allen]

Hi Dawn! I like the repost much better. The eye, head and upper beak look a little soft to me. You might want to try a little selective sharpening to see if that helps. Jetty Park is a great place to photograph birds!

[Julie Kenward]

I also like the composition of the bird better in the repost but it's really gone from soft to almost OOF in the sharpness department. In the first post you can see that the top of the head, eye and back of the neck are slightly soft...in the repost they're really to the point of being out of focus. I don't see what aperture you chose here in the data you gave but I'm thinking it's fallen a bit short of capturing the focal point on the eyes and has landed on the top of the back instead.

You might try resharpening the image to see if you can get that eye to be a bit crisper but I do think the neck and head feathers are going to be OOF no matter what.

[Dawn Currie]

This image reflects the sad reality of insufficient / poor quality glass. The 500mm Vivitar manual mirror lens I used has a fixed aperture and I've experienced problems with metering. When the magnification is increased, it is apparent that there is no sharpness making the entire shot look OOF. The repost actually was sharpened in CS3 as much as possible without creating a bunch of unwanted noise and an artificial look. My other attempt last weekend to use a 2x adapter with my 75-300mm only resulted in so much lens flare that I had to scrap the majority of my shots. Spending hours trying to salvage images in post processing is getting very frustrating. I have concluded that unless I can capture the bird using just the Canon 75-300mm, it is a waist of time. l'm going back out tomorrow in my camo. I haven't determined where and when I'm headed out yet since low tide is at 1:32 PM local so the best opportunities do not coincide with the best light.