This juvenile bald eagle was flying right over my head...so close that I had to clip the wings slightly. But even though it is not cropped at all, and it seems somewhat sharp, the image quality seems poor to me. I took the photo at noon on a cloudy day, so the light was not ideal...perhaps that's contributing to the image quality? Or perhaps the slight degradation from using the extender? I increased temperature, exposure, contrast, highlights and blacks in LR5, decreased whites, increased clarity, and applied the adjustment brush to the eye to lighten it. After resizing it for display, I also sharpened it slightly. Thanks in advance for your input.
Canon 7D Mark II
300mm f/4 lens with 1.4 extender
1/800s, f/7.1, ISO250
A great sight, but it's always difficult to get a good shot looking up against a bright sky. It looks like the camera focused well and I doubt the extender caused any problems. I think the main issue is too much contrast, which all of the listed adjustments except temp could be contributing to. I'd go back and try a less drastic approach. There's a limit to how well you can recover shadow detail on the underside of a bird in flight.
Also looks like some chromatic aberration along the trailing edge of the wing -- did you try the Lens Correction for it?
Looks like the poor guy's tail had a run-in with a lawnmower.
Last edited by Diane Miller; 03-08-2015 at 07:17 PM.
Thanks, Diane. I've reduced contrast, highlights, etc, and applied lens correction. I think this RP is an improvement....although I'm thinking I may apply a simple texture to the background and post it in OOTB!
But now the black point is too high -- you would expect more dark tones. It's worth another try. Can you post the original as it came into LR, with no auto adjustments?
Interesting, and not the lighting I expected. It's somewhat overexposed, which is good. I think just bringing down the exposure a little would get you very close, with moderate tweaks to the various sliders. The net of all the adjustments was that the contrast was just too high on the OP. Appears to be somewhat oversharpened, too.
Juvenile Bald Eagle
