Little Penguin!
This Little Penguin is part of a colony of Little Penguins that live on the break water of the St Kilda Pier in Melbourne, AUS. From what I understand they usually can only be seen at night but we saw many hiding out in-between the rocks and this guy stood on a rock and cleaned himself for everyone to see.
Handheld Canon 60D, 70-200 @ 145MM, F7.1, ISO 400, 1/640th.
adjustments in LR and some dodging and burning, 100% view.
CC very welcome!
I love penguins and you have a great one here.
Here's what I would do: I would clean up all the white poo. Then I would crop
some off the bottom...probably right under where that darker item is laying
on top of the rock below the feet.
Normally I'd say crop a little off the right and add some canvas to the left, but
for this one, I think I'd leave it as is.
I'm not sure of the top though. I say crop right below the black area.
Doug
Nice shot. I like the way you composed the image and I think the amount of room on the sides of the penguin is good. The dodging and burning you did really makes the bird stand out. I think the bottom right may be a little to dark for me(almost looks like vignette). I agree with doug about cropping the image. I would get rid of the dark area at the top of the frame, and then maybe a a tad off the bottom as well to balance it. To me the poop is not a big deal as you are showing the penguin in its natural environment and it happens. Removing items from an image and how much to remove is personal preference.
Leigh, this is an adorable picture and you've caught an interesting pose. The environment approach works though I agree with tightening it up a bit.
You mention this is a 100% view-does that mean it's cropped to 100% magnification, or that it's a full frame view (no cropping from original)-the reason I ask is that the file size seems small.
If it is full frame, I'd go ahead and crop it a bit tighter. If it's already been cropped to an extreme then I'd leave it as is.
The crop is a bit of a struggle due to original placement in frame, I wanted to include a few more leaves but it didn't seem to balance. Adjustments include -.39 CCW rotation to create more angle on the bird and better balance the comp. LR tweaks to WB and H/S, local brush to brighten the eye, removed two small elements. (running out of time, if interested in the adjustments feel free to drop a me a PM).
Adorable! I'd crop some top and bottom. I'm on the road for a couple of days making do with only the iPhone so can't comment on image quality.
Looking forward to seeing more from you!
Thanks everyone for their kind reply! I'll play with the crop a bit as this is a non cropped picture.
Originally Posted by Randall Farhy
Sorry, I meant this is a full frame picture and I hadn't cropped it at all. As for the file size I'm not sure, I have uploaded the full size picture to Flickr and then just linked to the picture size that BPN would let me post. I've tried uploading pictures to BPN before but have troubles posting a sharp picture compared to what I see in LR. Even the picture I posted isn't as sharp as the photo is in LR or in the Lightbox feather of Flickr....
I've used the sharpen tools that are posted at top (Not in this photo but previous ones) and I think its just something with my computer that when I resize a photo the jpeg always looks really pixilated or unsharp.
Last edited by Leigh Cojocar; 03-17-2014 at 01:58 PM.
If you're using Lightroom, just use the Export function with the desired parameters to create a JPEG. You can save a preset just for BPN, but you may occasionally need to change the compression parameter to fit the max file size here. All formats export equally sharp for me -- psd or Raw. There are 3 levels of sharpening available. I don't know how you could get a pixelated output. Are you viewing it at 100 percent (1:1)?
Ok so I was thinking about how I was viewing it out of Lightroom and I am finding that the image opens up bigger then the image is shown in LR and it looks pixilated, if I grab the corner and make the picture the same size as LR or smaller it looks much sharper.
Not sure how I can fix it to open the proper size.
ahhh but again when I upload the picture to bpn it blows it up on the forum and doesn't look as good...lol.
Last edited by Leigh Cojocar; 03-18-2014 at 02:47 AM.
Not seeing anything wrong with the sharpness on the repost- that eye is crystal clear on this monitor though the remainder of the image is soft-likely due to DoF limitations. You could try a touch of clarity on the detail areas to make them a little crisper.
yes there was a shallow DoF, but the eye and a bit of the head is crystal sharp in LR, just not once I post it on BPN. Oh well at least I know if its sharp in LR others are seeing it sharply also.
thanks.
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