Species Common Name- Brown Falcon Scientific Name- Falco berigora Date- 26/02/2016 Location- Kooragang Wetlands, NSW,AU Camera Details Brand/Model- Canon 7D Mkii Lens- Canon 100-400 Mkii +1.4TC @ 560 Camera Settings ISO- 200 F-Stop- 8.0 Shutter Speed- 640 Exposure Bias/Metering/Flash- 0/EV/0 Technique- Hand Held Attraction Aides- None Post Production- DPP - Standard + added a bit of brightness and shadows. Crop and export to PS. PS - Nothing except clone out some branches at the bottom & resize for web. Notes- Spotted this, guy or gal , while driving to the swamp. Gave me enough time to stop, put together the gear and get a few shots. It was an overcast day so background is grey sky. This one is without flash. The crop size image is with flash. I tried to get a little closer when it decided that was close enough. C&C welcome and appreciated.
The image with flash appears to be a much better exposure and there's a highlight in the eye. I'd like to see the flashed image posted the same size as the non-flash image, of course with the same branches cloned out. I'm not a fan of shooting perched birds from below. The closer to shooting at eye level the better I like it. Focus appears sharp, good colors, perch has some character, good body position and head angle, plain grey sky not so good.
Such a cool bird. I was lucky enough to see them on my trip to Australia many moons ago. Saw Black Falcon as well as your many other great raptors. Those Wedge-tailed Eagles are quite the sight. Even lucked into a rare Red Goshawk. Sorry for digressing .
I like the pose and that the strong feet are showing. I prefer on shots like this for the bird to have some more room to look into. Personal preference of course. Your bird has 3 areas that I think could use improving. I think it is too dark, does not have critical sharpness and is a bit noisy. You have some odd lines on the lower left edge of the frame and also on the bottom right corner just above where the branch starts. This is most likely due to cloning efforts where you used the clone tool and did not line up the edge perfectly. Still a strong image that I think could be made stronger with some minor tweaks.
Beautiful to get a shot at this guy/gal. Looks like a nice shot except for exposure issues. Dark birds against white skies are always hard to deal with -- or maybe more correctly, the dark side of a bird against a bright sky. Did you have a chance to try overexposing to bring out more detail in the bird? A quick glance at the histogram on the back of the camera can be a great light meter. If the sky is going to be white anyway, let it blow out in order to get detail on the bird.
Of course, in order to see the most accurate histogram, turn on the highlight warning (blinkies) and set a neutral JPEG setting to best mimic what you can do in processing.
Unfortunately, from the processed image, it looks like the darks are too dark to pull out much detail. There is more noise in darker tones than lighter ones and it is always a small exposure target to get detail in both ends of the tonal scale.
It looks like the image with flash was much better. Did you try to pull out more detail in the darks in PS with Curves? Or did you maximize the detail in raw processing?
Thanks for the C&C. Much appreciated.
This one is with flash and a bit of "tweaking" in PS. Although there were no blinkies I think it may have been a bit overexposed.
I am still in the early days of learning post processing.
Isaac, this image was taken vertical. I have a few in horizontal, with more space on left and right. As for the odd lines, it must be my bad cloning due to lack of experience with PS.
Thanks again.
If you want to play around with the white background...
Whenever I end up with a white background, I use the magic wand in PS. Make sure you
also select the area between the legs.
Then using the Channel Mixer, start moving the three channels, I think they're red, blue
and green. Try to turn the sky a little blue...but don't go overboard, cause it'll look fake.
For an example, if this works...here's an image of mine where the sky was white, but I changed it to
blue with the instructions above...
You can also try other colors. If you see thumbnails, the Chickadee had a tree for a background.
I didn't like the brown. So I changed it to move of a green to match the moss.
Doug, nice BG color work! You can also change color with Curves, going to the color channels and moving the top right corner down a little. It will take 2 channels, rarely all three, depending on the look you want.
But before I worked on a white sky I'd see if I could get the best tonalities out of the bird. The contrast is very high here and the darks very dark. See if you can do a repost with those things addressed. You would have to do that in raw conversion. Once tonalities are set when you go to PS you have much less leeway to reduce contrast pleasingly.
In Save for Web there is a checkbox you have to check in order to embed the profile -- it' a legacy thing from back in the days when embedding a profile was a user choice because it made the file size a few bytes bigger, and color mgmt was so primitive it wasn't considered that important. If you are using LR you can just go to Export, choose the parameters (including the max file size of 400K for here, which is very handy), save it as a preset and push a button to export any image, even a many-layered PS one in a different working space.
Check my web site for two LR tutorials. The Develop module is very well laid-out and intuitive, and powerful.
I think you can still pull out more dark detail in the bird. Good job on the sky but has some of the color come into the bird? The feet look lower contrast now. And of course one issue with adding color to a featureless sky is that it is artificially flat. Adding a subtle gradient can help a little. But it's all an excellent learning experience. Try with the Basic section in the Develop module and watch the histogram.
The Curves brought out some color -- don't know what it should look like, though. The head is looking nice, to me, but I'd go lower contrast (more shadow detail) on the body. Would love to see a rework on the raw file. We're always limited here when we work on a JPEG, but it's good to show ideas.
Lucky spotting - Brown Falcon
, while driving to the swamp. Gave me enough time to stop, put together the gear and get a few shots. It was an overcast day so background is grey sky. This one is without flash. The crop size image is with flash. I tried to get a little closer when it decided that was close enough.
.
