BirdPhotographers.Net

BPN's Image Of The Week and Eager To Learn, Spotlight Image Are Posted for the Week of 07/30/2010
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In our continuing efforts to improve your experience while at BPN, we will be make these changes effective immediately.

Staff changes:
Julie Kenward has been added as a moderator to the Friends, Family and More Forum, Introduce Yourself Forum and Eager To Learn Forum.
Blake Shadle has been added as a moderator to the Friends, Family and More Forum.
James Shadle has been added as a moderator to the Friends, Family and More Forum.
Arthur Morris has been added as a moderator to the Introduce Yourself Forum.
Robert Amoruso has been added as a moderator to the Wildlife Forum.
Jim Neiger has been added as a moderator to the Avian Forum.
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Image copyright 2007/Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART

Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS lens with the 1.4X II TC (handheld at 280mm) with the EOS-1D Mark III. ISO 1000. Evaluative metering +1 stop: 1/500 sec. at f/5.6.

Though Iceland's puffins are quite accepting I approached this bird very carefully so as not to scare it off the cliff and incur the wrath of my group Making sharp images with a 70-200 and the 1.4X teleconverter should be child's play for all competent photographers.

When most folks think of lenses for bird photography, they usually think of one of the super-telephoto focal lengths: 500, 600, or 800mm. But there are many times when lenses in that class are simply not the right tool for the job. ...

IOTW for 7/16/2010 Posted

As always, my many thanks to our staff who took the time to nominate their favorite images of the week.
Thank you BPN members for making it so hard to select just one IOTW from each critique forum.

Congratulations to all IOTW winners.
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Sometimes the light permits us to create a moody image as we capture it. Others, however, we can use effects to create the mood ourselves, as I did with this one here.
This is one exposure processed in Photomatix as a pseudo HDR, not too much grunge, because I was going for a soft look, but the HDR would bring out more detail than the conventional processing.
Once my images was properly saved as an HDR, I tool it into CS4 to be able to use the Nik Color Efex filters, that don't run in the 64 bit version of CS5.
First I used Glamour Glow (similar to the Orton effect) twice, adjusting the sliders to taste. Then a round of Classical soft focus. At this point, I duplicated the layer and went to Filters>Stylize>Find Edges. It is imperative to do this in a layer, because we are going to reduce the opacity down to 8% Almost forgot, I used Multiply as a blending mode.This filter is a drawing like effect and it will make your image ...