Take this one with a grain of salt

[Warren Spreng]

Simply posting because I was surprised at how this shot came out looking like an illustration without "playing" with it much at all. I assume it has to do with the distance from the ducks and the light conditions as this was part of a flock probably 200 feet away against a cloudy sky in the morning. Taken with the Canon T3i, 1/1600, f/6.3, 600mm ISO 800 Tamron 150-600 and hand held. The only processing was to raise the blacks to bring out the area under the wings and increased the exposure a pinch in LR. Cropped to get some cut off birds out of the image. Oh yeah, I did add an eye reflection as well.

Lots of work yet to do on my part to get good at hand held action shots, but boy this is fun!!

[Diane Miller]

Interesting juxtaposition of the two at the top. Good quality for the conditions -- getting a good image of birds in flight against a light sky is difficult, but it looks like you had some light behind you and made a good choice of exposure, to let the sky overexpose to get the ducks correctly exposed.

Raising the blacks will lower contrast -- is that what you mean by looking like an illustration? I'd try increasing Exposure and Shadows, in some combination, but you did get a nice look here. Where the dark end of the histogram should be will vary with different images, but for a pleasing look with most images you generally want it almost touching the left edge, but tapering off gently to that point.

Ducks are fast and hard to shoot -- good work!

[Warren Spreng]

Thanks Diane! Actually, I did raise the shadows, not the blacks, I went back and looked at LR and the blacks were left at 0, I was thinking of another image I was working on at the same time! As to the light, the "sun" was behind me so I was lucky in that respect as I must have looked like I was spinning like a top to my neighbors trying to keep these low flying "jets" in my view finder! As to looking like an illustration it is more the smoothness and lack of fine details that I think gives it that overall impression. The more I look at it though the more I like overall feel of this one.

[Diane Miller]

With any subject that small in the frame you'll get that kind of smoothness, which is lack of fine detail from not enough pixels on the subject, made worse by the lowered resolving power of high ISO.

[Warren Spreng]

With any subject that small in the frame you'll get that kind of smoothness, which is lack of fine detail from not enough pixels on the subject, made worse by the lowered resolving power of high ISO.

That makes sense, thanks!