Went back to Jacksonville, another Pelican attempt
I bought a used Tamron 150-600mm zoom and received it the day I left for my business trip. This picture was taken with that lens and a Canon 7D2. 1/800th, f8, ISO 400 at 500mm on a monopod. I cropped in quite a bit and made a few Lightroom tweaks. Let me know you would do different...
John, this is certainly different. Nice backward glance over the shoulder. I like the overall composition. For my personal taste, the image is over-saturated. I think if you toned down the saturation a little it would work for me. The shadow don the birds LHS is quite blue. If this is a big crop I think the IQ might be at risk here. I would also try to take out the bird poo on the post and perhaps tone down the yellow highlights in the background.
Thank you for sharing!
This is very cool John. I agree with Glennie about the saturation.
Good points from both of you, I was trying to bring out the yellow on his head. That is an easy fix.
Hi, John. Beautiful pose that bird gave you. I agree with the others about saturation. Especially of the red, drawing attention away from that expressive head. Bird poo doesn't bother me, as I think it adds a bit of verisimilitude. Glennie started something with this group that I've found valuable: including a screenshot of the overall image with the crop outlined. It's been most helpful for me, both in getting better feedback and being able to give more informed responses to the postings from others.
I like photographing pelicans. I think they and herons are an avian photographer's best friends. And you've captured an engaging bird.
A nice opportunity, but your colors are out of control and the tonalities are harsh. You should be able to recover much more detail in both the whites and darks. Can you give specifics of the settings you used in LR? It should give you lovely, subtle results with very simple settings, and is excellent in the leeway it has for correcting for harsh light. NEVER use an auto anything except perhaps for white balance, and then only to see if you like it.
Is your monitpr properly calibrated? The histogram is extremely valuable for monitoring whites and blacks.
A good way to express a crop is simply to look at the pixel dimensions of the cropped file in LR (toggle the "I" key) and multiply the two numbers. Then divide by the pixel dimensions of an uncropped image (20,000,000 is close enough for the 7D2) and multiply the result by 100. Express it as the percentage of the full frame, not as the percentage crop, which is ambiguous.
Try a rework with more subtle settings.
Here are my settings, I will work on it some today but I'm open to suggestions. Below I have a screen shot of the image compare in Lightroom so you can see the crop as well. I think the one thing that made the picture a bit saturated was that I used "camera landscape" under the Camera Calibration settings in the Develop module of Lightroom.
It was the Camera Landscape that gave it this look. I've never seen do anything good for an image. Adobe has emulated a setting that is part of the camera software, and they have probably done an accurate job. Those in-camera settings are for JPEGs and this one may give a punch to the image on the back of the camera, or to a very low contrast scene. Reset all the tonal changes to 0 and go back and try Adobe Std, Camera Std or Camera Faithful. Then enhance colors and work tones from there. Your histogram in the right hand screenshot shows blown whites and blocked blacks, although the sliders don't seem that extreme. (I can't see much detail in the small shots, though.)
I think the vertical fits the subject but I'd go a bit looser. This much crop isn't going to have good image quality except for the absolute sharpest capture.
The horizon is a little crooked so you may want to add canvas at the bottom in PS and then rotate to level it. It looks like you put the center sensor on the head, which is good except for the constraints it puts on composition. Rotating to vertical is a good thing to keep in mind, but with a subject this small in the frame, you should be able to get away with a focus and recompose.
Pelicans are great subjects and fun to shoot. I'd love to see a re-do, with possibly the reds changed a little in the HSL section. You may have to do that in PS to mask the bird out of that adjustment -- hard to know until you try, whether "reds" would affect the oranges in the bird.
I made some Lightroom adjustments and changed the camera calibration setting to "faithful". I also added some sharpening to the pelican. Histogram screen shot attached as well.
John, This is so much better! And, this was a huge crop. You've done well. Diane has some good advice.
I admire your sticking with this. And the progression of the image. It's this process that has worked well for me.
It was good getting the feedback and going back to the image on a different day when I had more time to work through how to apply the suggested changes. I was pretty impressed with that used Tamron lens that I purchased too. One of the lessons learned, in addition to the crop and color adjustments, was learning how to properly use the sharpening adjustments by holding the option key (I'm on a Mac) so I could better see the changes I applied. Not sure if you all could see the improved sharpening around the eye with the low resolution uploads, but I think it made a difference.
Better! Issues that remain: the tomato-soup color of the BG, the crooked horizon and post, and the bright OOF birds in the tomato soup. Did you recover as much highlight detail as you could? If the insert is just showing the adjustment panel it will be easier to see. No need for the whole screen.
I'd go further with the shadows and highlights sliders -- you have huge leeway there, and I'd work on the red in HSL, changing the hue and saturation, but beware of luminance.
If you could have gotten closer to the bird and turned the camera vertical you would have a much better starting file. Good to get one while you see something, but then always think about getting closer. But leave enough room for straightening horizons and the like.
Hi Diane - the whitish color in the red are not birds. It's actually markings in the red and green hull of the ship that was passing by. When I adjust the highlights slider in the Basic section of the Develop module to the right, the red, green and blue spikes start to clip above zero. Is that the adjustment you are referring to? All of the colors deepened when I decreased the exposure to -.90. I did rotate slightly from the original image, I guess I could have made the top of the post horizontal but I was focused more on the water level on the ship.
Will remember your point on taking a vertical picture next time. Makes sense for this type of picture.
Originally Posted by Diane Miller
OK -- a ship would account for the odd color. Wonder if the bird was still there after it passed?
Don't go to the right with highlights in cases like this -- go left to bring in more detail. And right with the Shadows. That will help mitigate the changes from lowering the exposure, but every image is different and you'll have to see where the best balance is for this one.
Looks like both the post and the water level would benefit from a slight CCW rotation, but hard to be sure about the post -- there isn't much to work with unless you add canvas at the bottom and try to fill it in realistically. Content-Aware Fill might work well.
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