Hello Everyone,
Hope you all had a great weekend. Sorry about the shadows on this one. My flash ran out of gas just before I had the opportunity to shoot this guy. When I got home and saw this it brought a smile to my face so I thought I would share it with you.
This was so close Steve !!!! Do like the pose and great arrangement for the tail feathers Has a fearless look !!! The side light and no flash combo sure hurt with the shadows Also the point of focus seems to be behind the eyes. Fully agree on the appeal and it is a fun image !!!!
A very interesting pose and unusual image, Steve. I like the way the tail feathers are illuminated with the light coming through from behind especially on the left side. I wish the front of the face was a bit sharper.
Very cool steve, love with this image. the pose and the tail display is outrageous. Dont mind the technical problems too much although I do agree flash would have helped it out alot with the shadows.
Thanks for the comments everyone. I actually had to back up on this one as I was too close. He wasn't going anywhere and seemed more interested in guarding his territory from other males than me being there with my big lens.
Next time I'll make sure I carry an extra set of batteries for the flash:D.
Wow, this is wonderful and I would treasure it if it were mine (and hope that I got another opportunity to get it perfect)!! It's really gorgeous in many ways!!!!
Delightful image for pose, color, and the bird's own sense of dramatic composition of its tail feathers. Like the idea of square crop. For fun I'd like to try a "Lighten the shadows" job in Photoshop (if that's OK with the OP); I will not use Shadow/highlight tool.
I'm no expert, just a piker who likes to try things. I went to Photoshop World in Orlando 3 weeks ago, and was immersed for 3 days in all the great things those instructors could do with an image, so now I'm having fun playing with images to see what can happen.
I wanted to replicate "fill flash" as I imagine it might have appeared in your image. Although the Highlight/Shadow tool does a very quick and pretty credible job of opening up the shadows, I don't know how to use it without having a "flat" appearance in the result. On the other hand, is this too much? It looks OK to me on my monitor, but don't know how it'll come across on a web browser, especially having used a copy of a down-rezzed jpeg as the file to work from and then saving it back to jpeg. Well, like I said, this is just for fun--but I think a real "Certified Photoshop Professional" using your original file could give you a very pleasing result.
This is a combination of layering copies with "Screen" mode, and curve adjustments to brighten, then erasing parts of the copied layers so the background and other parts of the bird aren't affected. Also selectively sharpened parts of the face, and used the square crop (just to see how it would look, but I prefer your non-centered original crop).
Hi John,
Thanks for your work on this. The changes are amazing as regards killing those shadows. That class you had in Photoshop really did the trick. I must get some training in it someday as I have pretty much been flying by the seat of my pants with these photo editing softwares. The sharpening is also a big improvment.
Normally I use Corel Photopaint and Adobe Lightroom for most of my touch ups and I would imagine that they have similar tools but obviously they require a little closer investigation on my part.
Angry Hummer
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote