My trip to Alberta this past August was filled with new opportunities to photograph seldom seen birds, locally. THis was one opportunity, I was a passenger in my friends car, when we saw this lovely Male Pheasant in all his glory. It was just a 5 image sequence of him running away. This is the fourth image which shows him glancing back to see where I was. Giving me just a perfect head angle (I hope).
I am using an old copy of Photoshop 6 on my laptop, so I hope it looks ok.
I used Fotosketcher and created this oil painting. I pasted in the original eye.
This is a super capture of the pheasant and its habitat. The colors and lighting are just wonderful. I'd suggest a couple things, however.
The pheasant is pretty much centered in the frame, so I cropped from both the center and the bottom. (Taking some off the bottom also eliminated much of the out-of-focus vegetation.) As much as I like the background, I was a bit distracted by the green stalk in front of the pheasant -- mostly, I think because the color stood out, and I wished the pheasant's head wasn't quite so close to the dark shadows. To remedy both of those, I copied the layer, flipped it horizontally, translated it both to the right and the top, added an inverted mask, and -- with a soft, medium-opacity brush -- brought back some background from the flipped layer.
Paul, this is beautiful! I love the wonderful light and slight head turn. Dennis has some good points specially the OOF grass in front. You could try to clone with another grass. Wonderful habitat image!
I prefer the OP but also agree that the OOF bit of grass could be cloned away. The 2nd image is cropped too tight for me as the lighting in the bkgd of the OP adds to the overall image and this is lost in the tighter crop.
A Glance Back
