Dungeness Bay at Tree Crabs Rd, bright sun, clear sky (= high contr, unusual hereabouts)
Nothing around, except a few distant Wigeons, some Crows, and this little guy who kept hanging around
Used a tripod for a change
Nikon D7100 + Tamron 150-600 at 500 mm
ISO 1000, f 8.0, 1/1600ss
No crop, LR Develop only:
Lighten beak shadow
Luminance 25, Detail 41, contrast 23
Sharpen Amount 25, Radius 0.7, Detail 38, Masking 8
No other PP. I tried some NIK processing, including sharpening, then tried High Pass sharpening. Nothing yielded any improvement I could see.
As usual, I'll be grateful for any comments.
Hi Jess,
You got nice and close which is always good. I like the bird on the rock and the slight look back is nice as well. Here are a few things that I think could benefit the picture.
Looks like your focus point was on the rump and not the eye as this area is sharper and shows better feather detail. Always better to get the face and eye in sharp focus. F8 should have been enough to get the whole bird in focus.
I would try and raise the shadows on the face as the eye and face are a bit in the dark. Looks like the whole bird could be made brighter.
The bright area on the rock below the bird could use some highlight reduction as could the very bright grass at the top right of the frame as well as the bright grass below the beak going side to side. They take away from the subject.
Not sure how you feel about cloning out things but that grass on the top right and maybe a few others could be gotten rid of.
Just my personal taste but it is always better to be at eye level with your subject. Often times that is not possible but I feel it helps with the overall composition.
Hope that helps.
Hi Jess. Common little birds they might be, but gee they make for good practice. I am in agreeance with Isaac. (Welcome Isaac!) If you could get rid of some of those OOF grasses (particularly the one that pierces his breast) would be good and the bright one in the top RHC. Focus does seem to be a bit off considering you were using a tripod. From past experience, I wouldn't be using the Sharpening/Luminance/detail/contrast sliders. I would also consider lightening his eye.
Isaac, thanks much for the comments and suggestions. I agree the rear end is in focus and the head is not. I placed the single point on the bird's eye, and yet, there's the rump. Why, at f 8, isn't the whole bird in focus?
I've been working on the other problems most of the day, but can't re-post (I understand) until 24 h have passed. So I'll wait and keep trying. The bright area on the rock will be no problem, but cloning out a few reeds will not be easy for me -- that's what I've been working on all day...;-(. I'm not against it, but the process is against me; always has been. I can knock out some of the reeds with a bit of cropping though.
I'll do that after the compulsory 24 h wait. As to cloning out: i can get rid of the bit of reed below the bird's rear end. There's a FLICKR group devoted to birds pooping, and I don't want to join it....;-) hasta maņana and Stand Fast!
Just saw your comments, Glennie. Thanks. The breast thing? Didn't notice. Guess I'll work on all that tomorrow.
Last edited by Jess M. McKenzie; 02-10-2016 at 08:53 PM.
If you have focused on the birds eye and the rump is in focus then you may be having focus problems with your lens. Guess they call that front focusing? Lucky in that I never had a lens that did that. Your bird is angled but not perpendicular to you so you may have needed a higher fstop to get the whole thing in focus. In addition, when you are very close to a bird, you may not be able to have the whole bird in focus when it is angled like this. Even at higher fstops.
What program do you use to do cloning? If you were in Photshop or on the Creative Cloud (which I highly recommend by the way for the nominal monthly fee.) you should be able to get rid of those very easily. Increase the magnification on your image and use the clone stamp tool. Get an area near where you want to clone and use that as your color. For instance, the horizontal branch below the head would be easy to use one of the out of focus areas just above or below it. Then carefully make a gap between the bird and the stick. Do this a couple times where you are essentially breaking the stick into a few pieces. Then use the lasso tool, set to content aware and lasso around the grass. It should then fill in the area very well. May have to mess with it a bit but give that a try. It is much much harder to accomplish this in lightroom and I would not recommend it.
Use the same technique on the bright grass on the top right of the frame.
Here is a link to a video on youtube that will show you exactly what I am talking about. The video is by Glenn Bartley, not me. Good luck and eager to see the results.
Beautiful image. The quality of work here has gone up considerably. I'm going to concentrate my nits on light. I agree that the well lit rock is a bit distracting. Perhaps more than a bit. And the area around the eye could be brighter. The bright OOF grasses(?) camera left are a bit overwhelming. It might be my old man's eyes, but the area from the beak to the eye appear sharp, as do the tail feathers. But not the breast or most of the wing.
I'm glad to see this post and look forward to seeing more from you. I'm about to put up a Sandhill Crane and want to get your feedback on that. TFS.
Last edited by Jim Keener; 02-10-2016 at 10:19 PM.
Reason: Returned to more traditional spelling of "to" and "not."
I'm late as usual -- the late Diane Miller... (Good excuse -- I was on a mission today, to check on the odds for the Horsetail Fall light show in Yosemite in about 10 days. Talked my hubby into a scouting fly-over. Cost me a lunch, though. Snow pack on top of El Cap is good for the first time in years and temp's may cooperate to melt some of it and dribble it over the fall on schedule by late afternoons. The light on the few-days-window with the magic sun angle at sunset is up to luck, but I'll be there, waiting.)
It's good to be late because all I have to do is say "Good advice above!" Harsh light is difficult but you can do a lot in LR/ACR. I'd try pulling Highlights all the way left and Shadows all the way right, balance with Exposure then see if you can back off of either Highlights or Shadows. Always best to find a more distant BG with sun not on it -- but easy to say!
Is it possible the bird moved a little between focus and shutter release? Continuous AF being active (don't know the Nikon term for it) can help keep a moving subject in focus. F/8 is a fairly limited depth of field for a small subject this close. You could go a little higher but the only real strategy is to be sure focus is on the eye and let the rest fall where it may. You don't want to get on the edge with SS or ISO. With an APS-C sensor you'll start to get diffraction softening by f/11 to f/13 anyway.
This is more cloning than I'd want to try, although good practice. Try setting up a perch and feeding them. Tripod is a good idea for being able to control the focus point and getting the best sharpness by controlling camera shake.
Same condx as last image, but this one taken about 2 sec earlier, during landing. I had a bad time taking out all those reeds in the first image, so gave it up. This image was more in the clear.
Thanks to Isaac for the Bartley URL. BTW, I have Bartely's ebooks (flash and PP). Just as I began the PP on this one, i discovered the patch tool, a wonderful adjunct to the cloning armamentarium.
Those few glitches you see were created by a shaky hand with a clone stamp. Just want you to know that I see 'em also.
As before -- please send in your critiques.
We hope you guys enjoyed the 2 h flt, Diane.
Glennie and Jim -- thanks for the kind words.
D7100 + Tamron 150-600 @ 500 mm ISO 1000
spot meter, tripod
1/1600 s, f 8.0
no flash, no crop
Significant editing in LR as before
lots of PS work, almost all of it spent mowing the grass
Nice catch on the landing pose with good AF on a moving subject. But lots of cloning/patching issues remain to be cleaned up. It's good practice but some backgrounds are just more trouble than they're worth.
The lightened shadows on the face went blue, which is an accurate reflection of the capture, but one we usually want to fix. Play with WB, then with the HSL sliders, and then resort to masking color adjustments in PS to that area.
After you pointed out the blue cast, Diane, it was an easy fix. ... but it took your eye to detect it. I selected the shadow, feathered the selection, and adjusted hue.
Lots of distractions in this image. I also practiced lots more with the cloning stamp and patch tools. It's pretty well fixed now, but it -- and you folks -- have taught me enough about this one, so I won't re-post. Thanks, everyone.
OK -- good. But a thought about selecting. If you use something like the lasso and then feather it, you're guessing. A wonderful way to select an area is to go to quick mask mode (next-to-bottom item on the toolbar) and choose black for the FG color and use the brush tool to draw over the area you want. You can size and feather the brush to give just what you want to cover and you can hit the X key to reverse the color to white to erase. Then hit the QM icon again and you have a selection. (The marching ants can't show the feathering, of course.) Then you'll need to inverse the selection unless you changed the option (see the tutorial cited below) and make whatever adjustment you want -- Curves, Hue-Sat, etc -- and you'll have a masked adjustment layer. You can edit the mask anytime you want, the same way you drew it.
Song_Sparrow
