Juvenile Brown Pelican

[Joel Eade]

From my Florida trip with James Shadle 9-3-10

1D MKIII
500mm f/4L
Tripod + Wimberly II
Manual mode
1/1250
f/5.6
iso 400
evaluative metering

ACR and CS5, cloned out a couple of bright spots in the BG trees.

[Bill Dix]

Nice landing pose, and love the water color. Bird looks sharp, but might look better if posted at the full 1024px width.

[Julie Kenward]

Joel, I was out practicing my BIF images on some seagulls at a local lake today so I am very impressed at how you froze the action here. Really nice work! I see two things that I think might make this even stronger...

First, since his wings are so large there's really no way to get his head/eye into a ROT's point but...you can do the next best thing and get his head/eye on the ROT's line. I cropped just a bit from top and sides to do that just to give you an idea.

Also, I find that the pelican is pretty close in tone and even color range as the BG. (There's a lot of beige/brown in the greens) so I moved the hue slider a bit to add more yellow and green to make the BG separate a bit more from the pelican. I might have overdone it a bit for effect but you can choose what to take or leave out.

Again - lovely image - you certainly got your money's worth from your day with James.

[John Chardine]

This one if very good Joel and I like the repost but I like the original too, with a bit more room given to the bird. You have nailed the sharpness in this one.

[Thanaboon Jearkjirm]

Very nice focusing on the bird, sharp with lots of details. I also like the hint of environment in the background and the catch light in eye. TFS.

[Dawn Currie]

I love everything about this, the only thing I might tweak is the highlights - they seem a bit bright on my monitor.

[Dawn Currie]

I love everything about this, the only thing I might tweak is the highlights - they seem a bit bright on my monitor.

I decided to come back and try out a technique that Robert Amonruso, a BPN Associate Publisher, suggested for one of my photos that I posted on the Wildlife Forum:

To reduce the brightness using photoshop.
1) In the channels palette, double click on the RGB channel while holding down the CTRL key (assuming Windows, CMD is MAC). This creates a selection of the highlights.
2) Back at the layers palette, create a BG copy and on the BG copy create a layer mask using your selection. Just click on the layer mask icon at the bottom of the palette. THis will create a grayscale mask.
3) On that BG copy, change the blending mode to Multiply. This multiplies each pixel color by itself. Since highlights are painted much lighter on the mask, this will darken them.
4) Adjust opacity to suit your tastes. Lowering opacity will lighten the image if too dark.

[Joel Eade]

Very nice re-post, I'll have to try this technique, Thanks!