Itchy Foot Hoodie

[Scott Frye]

Hooded Merganser at a residential pond near Spring Hill, Florida

1/640 at F8 and ISO400 EC -1 1/3
Canon 500mm with 1.4 TC
Canon 7D

[Randy Stout]

Scott:

Cute pose of a fun little guy. By pure chance I was out shooting a hoody about 3 hours ago. It was a bit colder here:) He was restricted to a small area by ice buildup.

Looks like it could use a bit CW rotation.
Did you need to do any work on the breast? I have never seen one with quite this pattern of light and dark bands. Perhaps just a side effect of his scratching pose? The white on the crest seems much lighter than the breast, perhaps some shadows here.

I think you can improve the apparent sharpness by doing a little burning of the pupil, so the edges are more distinct.

Cheers

Randy

[Daniel Cadieux]

Hey, this guy forgot a spot when he combed his hair over:p

Randy has covered most, and I agree with it (with the most obvious point being rotation needed). There is also some purple in the whites that need correcting. P.S. The whites on the breast look muddied...did you darken them in post?

Neat scratching pose, I don't think I've seen an image of this species doing that.

[Scott Frye]

I did a Shadows/highlight -- Darken Shadows in PSE9. That brought out the detail in the chest -- I did not apply to the chest only but to the whole picture. I could not draw any detail with this method from the white spot on the head. Most of my hoodie picture have the eye blown out like this bird. The blown out eye appears in almost all of my hoodie picture. Not sure what causes this but its repeatable in the hoodie shots.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Thanks Scott, it bit what I suspected - the S/H can give you muddied whites when applied too aggressively. Other tools such as Levels or Curves...or the dodge and burn tools (all applied judiciously of course) can and will yield cleaner results for such tweaks.

P.S. The eye does not look blown out at all and actually looks quite good IMO.