Harlequin Ducks

[Christopher Ciccone]

I've head some very nice responses from other quarters on this pic, so I thought I'd share here to see what critical feedback I could gain from the professional eyes here. Photographed in Rockport, MA on Jan 7th on the rising tide.
I exposed to the right, but feel like I have blown the whites a bit too much trying to get the color & details in breast and head - are the whites too hot, or OK in this case?

Canon 1Dmk4, 500mm+1.4TC, 1/1000s, f/8, ISO400

107165

[Mital Patel]

Christopher,

You have nailed the shot here. getting two in front is anyone's dream. Expo is just bang on. the Dark blue water compliments the orange and grey very well here.
I've found the white's gone really hot here. You can surely make mask and recover that ..

Crop is fine to me but still as another thought i might try putting both drake's higher in frame giving it pano look also would b nice by chopping few pixels from top.

[Randy Stout]

Christopher:

Good advice from Mital. It is a bit hard to tell at this image size, but I am not seeing a lot of detail in the whites, and I would certainly revisit the raw file, reconvert once for the whites and once for the remainder of the image, and see if you can't tease out some more detail in the whites. Lots of other ways to try to get more from whites, if when you reconvert you can see some detail there to start with.

Neat that you don't have any merge of the birds.

If the IQ will tolerate, I would def. crop tighter top and bottom. Because of the poses of the birds, I think it works fine to have them centered, but having them larger in the frame would work for me.

Cheers

Randy

[Sachin Saraf]

Surely a nice image Christopher...Rightly pointed out by Randy that there is no overlap between two...and another vote for Crop suggested by Mital...

I find it is very difficult to get enough details in whites for this species...

[Christopher Ciccone]

Thanks all - unfortunately I do really think that I've lost the detail in the RAW, but I am definietly going to look at it again and see if I can tease any little bit out. (With them going into and out of the water constantly, their feathers seem smooth and slick as diver's suits, and when I tried to pull up more detail in the whites, they just started to look dirty - that's not to say that I won't try again though!!! :) )

I do believe the IQ can tolerate a closer crop and will try that as well. Thanks again all!!

[Marina Scarr]

Lovely photo and pair you have here. The colors are gorgeous. It almost looks as though you cut them out and pasted them onto this gorgeous blue BG. The whites do lack detail but the capture still works well for me. Love the way the birds don't intersect yet they are facing each other b/c there is an intimacy there.

I agree with Randy and Mital that you can find a stronger crop than this one to better showcase your subjects...just not sure which of their crops would work the best. Mital's suggestion is a bit more unorthodox, but I think would be a strong choice.

[Christopher Ciccone]

Thanks Marina for the kind words - I am looking forward to getting back in front of my home computer to try some of the cropping suggestions

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

They sure are beautiful and I really like the position of the two together. Agree about working the crop.

[Christopher Ciccone]

Well, i wasn't able to get much more out of the white, but I did crop a little tighter. Decided not to go for the pano crop - just didn't feel right. They are still relatively centered in the frame, but I think I like that best. Any additional thoughts?
107210

[Mital Patel]

Well, i wasn't able to get much more out of the white, but I did crop a little tighter. Decided not to go for the pano crop - just didn't feel right. They are still relatively centered in the frame, but I think I like that best. Any additional thoughts?


Christopher

there you go on the crop. i like what you did for crop. no matter pano or not.

now i think the white's are still hot push the highlight in selective color while doing from raw. Or else the other work scenario if the ethics permit you to do so is that you process two version.

one is the actual you do like you did here which is good. and the another is two stop under and then mask the white's a bit on the actual correct exposure version.

am sure you will wanna try that out. this is more processing yes but when you have such a great frame you want it to be more better and near to perfect isnt it ?

[Robert Holguin]

This are truely beautiful ducks. You have done a great job on captureing them. Love the pose on both ducks. Just the right amount of seperation between both, and I like your erpost best.
Well done.

[Mital Patel]

Christopher i am still in fever of your colorful image.
was playing with someone's image to the correction and tried on yours too.

i think you can open up Levels and do the mids 1.40 and see if you like it.
yes your white's will go more prominently which if you can share raw we can try it out our hands on if dont mind to share recovery process.

just for the try.

[Christopher Ciccone]

i think you can open up Levels and do the mids 1.40 and see if you like it.
yes your white's will go more prominently which if you can share raw we can try it out our hands on if dont mind to share recovery process. just for the try.

Thanks Mital - I'll look at trying a levels adjustment to the mids.
I definitely am struggling trying to recover anything out of the blown whites. When I tried opening a copy a few stops darker (don't mind a little extra post-processing work if it means I can improve the image), but I didn't get any more detail - the whites turned a toasted marshmallow color with some weird halo artifacts toward the edges.
I've tried a few other things too, and had similar results just using the "recovery slider" in ACR when I pushed it hard to the higher numbers, also tried linear burn. (I wish I had Color EFX4 and could try the "details extractor filter" that so many seem to be having good luck with, but for some reason it will not run with the "old graphics card" on my 3yr old laptop - still not sure that could do anything with this image though)