Female Wigeon

[Colin Gilyeat]

I stopped by the Choptank River in Cambridge, MD to shoot soem duck iamges. Lots of Wigeons, Canvasbacks, and a lone Redhead Drake.



Uncropped, tripod,
Nikon D7000, Sigma 150-500@500mm, ISO400, f/9, 1/600, -1/3EV

I think that the eye could be brightened a little, but I'm just very good at that, yet. I was reluctant to add canvas to the left side due to the tecture of the water, so there is less room there than is ideal.

Comments and Criticism are welcome.

COlin
PP in LR4,

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Colin,Nice critique and I agree when a subject like this has a bright, clear well-lit eye it really strengthens the image. The crop and subject placement usually present options in this case the first thing that comes to mind is the negative space on the bottom - I would remove a layer above your signature. I do agree that more on the left is a leading practice the thinking is area to move into - a continuation of the images virtual motion.This is a beautiful subject and it is always challenging IMO to include habitat when it is all water,..the thinking here is to balance the frame and show the subject in a natural form. Keep at it, love to see more ducks,..love them!!

Just curious, did you have a flash handy and consider fill flash,..which can also add detail to the image.

[John Chardine]

Hi Colin- This image has potential and the repost is to give a quick idea of this. You are right it is not easy to clone water but if you take your time you can do a much better job than I did. I took as a starting point the water on the right hand side, which I knew I was going to crop out (too much negative space behind the bird). I brightened the whole image with Levels and also tweaked the colour balance to remove a greenish cast.

By the way, the original image was much larger than BPN limits, which are 1024 x 800 pixels. This is a male American Wigeon- females are much plainer with no green or white flash on the head.

[Colin Gilyeat]

Jeff - Thaks for taking time to comment on this for me. I had my flash with me, but didn't even think to pull it out. I've been think of getting a Better Beemer to make it easier to get light on subjects that are some distance away.

John - Thanks for the recrop and repost. I started to work on a repost liast night, and I'll get it up this evening when I get home. I didn't realize just how dark may original was until I saw your repost. Sometimes I struggle with determining just what the proper exposure should be, even after looking at the histogram. I have a basic understanding of ETTR, but I'm just mot sure how far to the right the histogram should be. I thought that the histogram should be more-or-less centered for a good exposure, and that's waht I have teneded to do. I don't recall exactly where the histogram on this one this is, but I'll look this evening.

I looked the Wigeon up and thought I had identified it correctly as a female, obviously I misread the ID.

As for the image size, I brought it in from my flickr account and must have grabbed the wrong one. That problem will be taken care of once I become a BPN member.

Colin

[John Chardine]

Hi Colin- ETTR is something you think about in-camera when making RAW images. It gives the best signal to noise ratio for your image. Under ETTR your histogram should tend to be pushed to the right but not so much that you clip highlights. Once you bring the image into Photoshop or wherever, you will usually want to dial back the exposure some and I would do this by eye, making sure that you maintain detail in the shadow areas. All this assumes you have a reasonable display, ideally colour-corrected, but as least with the brightness set not too dark and not too light. You can check your brightness setting by making sure you can see all the tones from black to white in the monitor calibration strip at the bottom of this page.

[Colin Gilyeat]

John, Thanks for the addiional thoughts on ETTR. One thing I need to do is get a calibration tool so I can really calibrate my monitor. Although, I'm really not sure how effective that would be on a laptop display, as that is where I do all of my processing.

Colin

[John Chardine]

Hi Colin- The main problem with modern displays is that they tend to be too bright for normal ambient lighting, so knocking back the brightness often works. I would try the monitor calibration strip first.

[Colin Gilyeat]

I went back and added canvas to the left, cropped some of the excess space from the bottom, and made some adjustement swith LR4 curves.

Colin

[John Chardine]

A big improvement Colin. I still think you could open up the shadow areas more. You are fighting sun angle in this image with it coming from significantly around to your right. This lights up the tail of the bird and keeps the head (main point of interest and where your eye goes first) and breast in the shade. You can control sun angle by moving around into the right position if possible. If not possible you have to wait until your subject moves into the right place.

Here's an excellent discussion of this subject by Roger Clark:

http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/...ition.subject/

BTW I don't like the colour of my repost above! I'll give it another shot if I get the chance.

[Colin Gilyeat]

John, Thanks for the link on ETTR. I really appreciate you taking time and providing your comments. Hopefully, I can take advantage of them and improve my images.

I have a number of other images from the time I took this one that I think have the sun in a better angle. I'll get one of them posted either this evening or tomorrow.

Colin