Theme: Canada geese in flight w motion blur

MK3L8936 Geese blurred in flight.CR2
Canon EOS-1D Mark III
EF500mm f/4L IS USM +1.4x
Wimberley II on Gitzo 3541LS
12/02/09 7:12:56 AM
Manual Exposure, 1/10, f/6.3
ISO 800
Evaluative Metering
Cropped to approx 20% of original frame

Just before sunrise, I captured this image of a pair of Canada geese at the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge south of Portland, Oregon. Slow shutter speed in the low light gave me nice blurs showing the wings at both high and low stop points, as well as the simultaneous bobbing motions of the heads. I like the way the image captures the gestures of flight without anatomic detail. There's a hint of the eastern sky's glow on the breasts. The sun barely reaches 20 degrees above the horizon at high noon here these days, so I go with the flow an get some artistic blurs. The wind was icy and damp, and I barely managed to get my stiffening fingers to push the button.

Comments and suggestions always welcome; thanks for looking.

Craig, I love the amount of blur, the wings do have a nice sense of motion. The BG could use a bit of NR. Very artistic looking and lovely!:)

Thank you, Denise, good to hear from you. I didn't try NR, thinking it would smooth the image excessively, but a single pass with Dfine 2.0 seems to improve the overall effect. I think selective NR on the BG would have been problematic because of the existing indistinct boundaries between the birds and BG. Thanks for the suggestion. Here's the NR'd image.
Craig

Hi Craig, Good to see you posting here-you should share your motion blurs more often. I love these type of images. On a blur like this adding it to the entire image seems like the way to go. I just love the motion in those wings!:) I went up to the beach this morning and the shells that were turned upside down were filled with ice:eek:It was so cold. I can relate to the stiffening fingers!!

This is a big departure from what you started with but I just had to try it.

I opened the image and did an automatic levels adjustment and then used the white eyedropper on the BG to set it up as high key. I then cropped to a 10x5" pano to give the birds more prominence in the frame.

Not that I thought there was anything wrong with the original but it seemed dark to me and I wanted to see how the wing blur would look against a high key BG. See what you think...

Hi Jules, thank you for demonstrating your take on the image. Your hi-key treatment livened the colors of the birds' bodies nicely, and I think the greater contrast displays the image well. The more I look at it the more I like it.

I see your point about tightening the crop to increase the birds' prominence, but the pano feels a bit tight for my taste. I cropped the original so that the 2nd bird would be on the UL ROT intersection and thought it useful to not only maintain some space ahead of the birds direction of travel, but also below to give a sense that they were indeed aloft (even though that's obvious, objectively).

I boosted the brightness a bit in PP, but not quite enough. I wanted enough sky tone to keep some of the enveloping sense of the dawn darkness, but without making it gloomy -- perhaps a conflicted objective. It may be that hi-key is the best way to get the needed contrast, so thank you especially for pointing out that possibility.

Artie is fond of reminding us that the big secret of fine photography is many little secrets. Likewise, the secret of learning fine photography consists of many of little revelations (and hopefully, an occasional "aha"). It's wonderful to do that here among friends!

-- Craig