Black-winged Stilt

[Scott Turner]

This shot of a Black-winged Stilt is one of my favourites from a recent trip of mine. I really like the background colours created by the shore and reeds on the other side of Narrabri Lake, (North West New South Wales, Aussie :D) and the bright red iris colour.

Shot on my Canon 1DIV and my trusty 500mm F4 + 2xTCIII at 1/500s @f8 ISO320 with my Gitzo tripod and Jobu Pro2 gimbal. I imported and edited the image in Photoshop with ACR and used Artie's 50/50 Nik preset for detail extraction and followed that up with a 40% unsharpen mask layer and finally applied noise reduction to the background with Topaz Denoise.

[Enrique Patino]

BG is just awesome, good details, and POV is great. I cant tell if some white are hot, but it does not bother me as is. TFS

[Ian Wilson]

Good low angle, nice eye contact, great background. On my monitor the bird looks too bright and I wonder if it would be better pulled back a wee bit? I think this would reveal more detail in the whites, make the gloss on the wings look richer, and make the legs look more sexy. Good work all the same. Regards, Ian.

[John Cooper]

A nice presentation of the this stilt Scott.The stratified tones of the BG enhance the composition for me.

[Binu John]

Beautiful low angle shot! Love that BG. Agree with Ian's suggestion about extracting more details from the whites.

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Scott, that low perspective got you an incredible perspective and allowed that top layer to shine through.

Whites look a bit hot on my monitor, otherwise real nice!

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

from my limited photography experience, a good base RAW file does not need so many fancy steps to bring out much detail at all. I think your whites are overexposed, as I cannot see any detail (especially on the head), but then I am not sure why your background would need to have noise reduction done at ISO320 especially on a 1Dx? My embarrassingly old 1D bodies don't normally need any NR even at ISO1600, unless I wet to heavily crop the file, which is what I never advocate doing or do myself, regardless of the amount of available pixels.

Lovely background.