This shot was taken during the early morning light at 9:15am. My camera settings were Canon 7D & 500mm F4 + 1.4xTCIII at 1/2000s F5.6 ISO250. I was using a Manfrotto monopod while setting on the sand with my left hand resting on the top of the lens for stability. No flash used. I have sharpened with Nik and edited mostly in Lightroom 5 but also used Photoshop CS6 to remove a swan that was in the back left of the water taking up about 1/8 of the frame. You can see a small change in the noise reduction around the sides of the pelican in some areas as I was trying to get in between his feathers and was using Lightroom brushes and photoshop blur, which caused it to look slightly off.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated both with my technical set up and my editing. Thanks :)
Hi Scott! A great moment captured and it looks like you got good focus. Would have been great if the pelican had looked to the side a little more so we can see more of the beak, if not the face, but you couldn't control that.
Softer light would have been better, too. You might try for more detail in the whites (LR's Highlights slider). The dark vegetation in the background competes with the wings -- I wonder if the wingtips could be held down with the Blacks slider while the vegetation is lightened? You might also see what you think about some desaturation of the blue water -- it jumps forward a bit more than it needs to.
The cloning: I don't see any obvious traces of it, but I wouldn't try that in Lightroom -- not sure what you did with brushes there but you can work more precisely in PS. I wouldn't use Blur, either. Try selecting the wing with the Quick Selection tool (or Topaz ReMask) and inversing the selection so you can clone without getting into the wing. The Patch tool can also be excellent. Clone with a fairly large and slightly hard brush to keep from smoothing out noise or texture with the partially opaque edges of the brush. But a completely hard one will show where edges don't match. The Patch tool will work better in many cases.
See if any of this works for you, and we look forward to more posts!
Hi Diane, Thanks for the feed back. I did my cloning in photoshop for anything somewhat major. I didn't think about the water being over saturated thanks for that and about the wing tips as well. I'll re-edit it and see how I go Thanks
Nice one, Scott! Diane said it all - had it been mine, I also would have raised the shadows a bit in LR to see if I can get a bit more detail out of the black feathers.
Australian Pelican about to land
