Into the Light

[David Bose]

Here is an interesting image of a Great Egret I captured during an early morning sunrise this past weekend from my boat. At first I hated it but it starting to grow on me. I was originally trying to get some shots of this egret wading along the shoreline with the sun directly behind me and after a couple of quick test shots to check my histogram for correct exposure I looked back up and it had taken to flight and was heading toward me. Knowing now the bird would be underexposed but not really having much more that 2 seconds to get my camera up and focused on the incoming target I didn't feel I had time to try adjusting my exposure.

Out of the series, this was the best but albeit quite underexposed. The only adjustments made was a little crop, bumped the whites up +14, and added a left sun flare preset to compliment that the bird was flying directly toward the rising sun in LR and a very slight iris enhancement. The downside to adding the sun flare in LR is that my correctly exposed whites are now a bit overexposed but I think it may work here. I am considering adding canvas at the top but not sure it needs it.






7D + 400mm f/5.6L, 1/5000 @ f/5.6, -2/3 EV, ISO 400, AI Servo 19 point AF, Handheld

Your thoughts are welcomed.

[gail bisson]

I think you have done quite well to salvage this picture.
I am not familiar with the sun flare preset but I am sure you could mask out the bird so that the flare effect would not affect the bird.
I would add a bit more canvas left and top.
I would also see if you can get more details out of the blacks,
Gail

[arash_hazeghi]

I like the clouds in the BG, sharp details. The sun was on the wrong side unfortunately and a bit too large in the frame as presented

TFS

[David Bose]

Thank you for the suggestions Gail! I played with the image a bit last night, removing the flare effect in LR which brought my whites back nicely. I will try masking out the bird and reapply the flare to see how it looks.
I did add canvas to the top and left but so far I am not completely satisfied with my cloning the background onto the added canvas. For the most part it blended perfectly but right above the bird for some reason it appears a little muddled, certainly not a perfectly smooth background as it was to start with. I was using 0% Hardness, Normal mode, Opacity 100% and Flow 100%.

The sun flare preset was one that I had downloaded but never used.

I tried to bring out the blacks but it doesn't look possible because when I try it really just brings out color noise.

David

[David Bose]

Thanks Arash! Actually it was a clear blue sky but underexposed by at least 1 stop. It was an early morning very bright sunrise. I agree about it being too large in the frame, the bird was too high in the frame when I captured it, I was in a rocking boat. I am working on adding canvas to be able to correct the composition.

David

[David Bose]

Here is another iteration after adding canvas and re-cropped. I also removed the sun flare preset and bumped up the exposure and shadows a bit.