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Another fantastic interaction shot, Ofer.
I'm looking forward of seeing the babies.
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pretty awesome stuff mate :)
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Nice one Ofer - just hope they breed successfuly. I like the colours here.
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Lovely capture of act here,Ofer.Beautiful colors.The BG looks a bit noisy to me,might be due to fog?
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Originally Posted by
Sanjeevprakash
Lovely capture of act here,Ofer.Beautiful colors.The BG looks a bit noisy to me,might be due to fog?
Thanks for your comments guys!
Sanjeevpraksh, this was shot at iso 800 from about 17 meters and it is about 75% crop. No exposure adjustment was needed and no noise reduction nor blurring were applied.
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Post a Thank You. - 1 Thanks
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Nice scene, good capture.
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Super Moderator
excellent pose and light with killer interaction. I bumped up the contrast a tad and added some fine sharpening to equalize sharpness between the two heads
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Sweet! Great job getting them in parallel with both heads so sharp. I like Ari's PP suggestion. Would love to see those chicks, good luck.
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Thanks for taking the time my Arash! I don't feel the boost in contrast was needed as this was taken in a foggy morning and the female's head looks over-sharpened to me in the re-post. For me a sharp image doesn't necessarily means being able to see every tiny feather which often looks un-natural.
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Super Moderator
to my eyes the critical focus seemed on the upper bird that's why I sharpened the lower one a bit more.
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Originally Posted by
arash_hazeghi
to my eyes the critical focus seemed on the upper bird that's why I sharpened the lower one a bit more.
Thanks Arash. This is not an issue of critical focus as I had 20 cm of DOF which was plenty. The problem was the water vapours that were coming out of the dump soil that caused an optical distortion. I took thousands of images in this location and way too many of them were not as sharp as I am used to. Actually in the late afternoon when the soil is both dump and warm it is almost impossible to get a sharp image. The male looks slightly sharper as he is a bit further away from the soil which reduces the effect.
You can see the effect I am talking about in my OP on the left hand side where the BG doesn't look smooth as expected. I can see you have blurred the BG in your re-post.
Last edited by Ofer Levy; 09-03-2012 at 04:11 AM.
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Publisher
I greatly prefer the repost by Arash. Bummer that the female was angled slightly away from you and even worse that her head was angled away even more. Otherwise spectacular.
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Ofer, good stuff! Besides all the sharpening talk above, I just really like the dynamics that you were able to capture! Thanks for sharing and I hope to see future images of the tiny ones!
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Super Moderator

Originally Posted by
Ofer Levy
Thanks Arash. This is not an issue of critical focus as I had 20 cm of DOF which was plenty. The problem was the water vapours that were coming out of the dump soil that caused an optical distortion. I took thousands of images in this location and way too many of them were not as sharp as I am used to. Actually in the late afternoon when the soil is both dump and warm it is almost impossible to get a sharp image. The male looks slightly sharper as he is a bit further away from the soil which reduces the effect.
You can see the effect I am talking about in my OP on the left hand side where the BG doesn't look smooth as expected. I can see you have blurred the BG in your re-post.
I agree the refraction from heat raising from water/mud is sometimes a problem for sharpness. In those cases I usually use a fine radius sharpening to recover some of the details.
I didn't blur the BG, I just applied some NR to take out the noise and the harsh bokeh that resulted from the heat. Blurring the BG makes it unnatural IMO too.