I took this shot last week end at Bolivar Flats, TX. This was my first time shooting Shorebirds and I used my Tripod and did not quite get as low to the ground as I would have loved. I will be heading out this week and will try to get shots parallel to the ground.
Post processing involved Tonal Correction, Noise reduction and adding a little vignetting.
Hello Krishna, Welcome to the ETL forum! This is a very cute little bird.
Can you tell us if this was a crop? What was your SS? Letting us know as much as you can, helps to give a better critique. Do you have any more room on the right? For my tastes, the bird is just a little too far over to the RHS. If this were mine, I may crop it below the dark object at the top and maybe halfway between the OOF rocks in the FG and take a slice off the LHS as well. The dark object in front of the bird is a little distracting. I'm not sure if you would consider cloning out. The little raised foot is nice, but OOF. Maybe your SS?
I certainly know birds don't always present themselves where we would like them, but keep an eye out for uncluttered BGs and FGs. I hope you have fun this weekend. It would be interesting to see if you managed hand holding. A few folk here use skimmer pods, one uses a boogie board. All these things to try!
Thank you for the comments. Below is the screenshot of the image before cropping it. Going forward will include pre crop image as well.
I completely agree that uncluttered Bird Images are much better. I did not want to crop too much as it would lead to pixelated and low quality image. I wanted to include the info about the various items on the beach. I tend to avoid any cloning etc in my images but I think this is the right one to clone out unwanted distractions.
Thank you for the comments.
I will be using skimmer pods for shooting this week, so will have fun with sand.. Hopefully some decent shots.
From the bottom, I'd crop out as much as that foreground as possible...probably just below the birds
feet.
From the top, like Glennie said, below that dark object.
From the left, where that other dark object is, but clone it out.
The next part is, its underexposed. First, make sure you put the
bird on its own layer. Second, increase the exposure on the bird.
The reason you want to do this is, if you left everything as is, and
increased the exposure, you'd end up blowing out the water. Putting
the bird on its own layer stops that from happening.
The subject determines the crop -- it the IQ isn't up to it, you just have a compromised image. Here the crop is pretty clear, to remove areas that are hurting more than helping. I'd crop from the top to just below the dark object, from the bottom to loose about half the out of focus foreground, and from the left a fair bit.
There was a discussion somewhere in the last few days about the drawbacks of converting to DNG. I don't remember where it was or who was doing it, but it would be worth looking for. It was a comment by Arash.
BTW, something has gone wrong with the aspect ratio of your post showing the crop. Not a big problem there, but something to be aware of.
Thank you for the details. I will do a tighter crop next time/ I will pay more attention to the surrounding before taking the shot.
Yeah Arash mentioned that DNG is not the standard way and one should retain raw files. This was a old image and unfortunately I deleted all the raw files thinking that DNG is equivalent to RAW.
Going forward I will only Store raw files as it is and will not convert them to DNG format.
Thank you everyone for the valuable comments/suggestions.
Doug mentioned underexposure -- check your histogram and you will see it. (The histogram is a light meter on steroids!) Here is a better exposure with a little further lightening in the darks (with a simple curve bowed up.)
I don't know what you are using for a raw converter, but Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw (same engine, different interface) has very good leeway for bringing down bright areas and bringing up exposure and detail in dark areas. Of course, any increase in exposure will reveal the noise that is present but it can be dealt with if not too bad.
And here's a suggestion for the crop, although the out of focus foreground rocks aren't ideal. I've added some canvas on the left but didn't try to fill it in, just to suggest what feels right to me. It may not show depending on your BG skin here on the forum.
Sanderling
