Cliff Swallow

[Tammy Griffey]

This is my first post here. I took this photo from a boat so not the easiest to get a good shot. Removed dust spots, straightened, lightened the shadows, darkened the highlights, increased saturation and cropped off the top and bottom of the photo(cropped from 6000 x 4000 to 5667 x 2736). I tried using shake reduction in photoshop but it seemed to make it worse. My sister loves the picture and would like to have a print but I'm not sure if the print would look good.

Nikon D7100
210mm
f 5.3
ISO 400

Looking forward to comments,
Tammy Griffey
http://www.griffeysunshinephoto.com

[Randy Stout]

Hi Tammy:

Welcome to BPN. Neat line of nests, well exposed, soft colors.

It would have been even better if one of the birds was poking his head out of a nest. The image could use a bit more sharpening on the nests.

I do find your signature a bit distracting, esp. on this type of graphic image, without a lot of detail to soften its impact.

From a compositional standpoint, I would consider moving the nests just slightly off the horizontal midline, probably a bit up. Tends to be a bit less static than centering it on the horizontal midline.

Cheers

Randy

[arash_hazeghi]

Randy gave excellent critique, I also wish we could see the birds, without them and with the overwhelming colors from the man made wall, this images doesn't quite work for me as an avian image-although the nests are cool!

TFS and welcome to BPN!

[Tammy Griffey]

Randy and Arash, I appreciate the comments. I re-cropped as you mentioned and removed the watermark. I believe I had used shake reduction on the previous photo but did not use it on this one. I added the sharpening(using camera raw in photoshop, sharpening was around 60) and a small amount of noise reduction(20). Most of the birds had left the nest when I found these. I did capture a few pictures with the babies where you could see their heads but I the noise was so bad, I couldn't use them. Will post one if you want as another thread.

[Tammy Griffey]

I uploaded a second picture in this thread trying to apply the techniques you mentioned. Would you mind telling me what you think of the second photo?

Hi Tammy:

Welcome to BPN. Neat line of nests, well exposed, soft colors.

It would have been even better if one of the birds was poking his head out of a nest. The image could use a bit more sharpening on the nests.

I do find your signature a bit distracting, esp. on this type of graphic image, without a lot of detail to soften its impact.

From a compositional standpoint, I would consider moving the nests just slightly off the horizontal midline, probably a bit up. Tends to be a bit less static than centering it on the horizontal midline.

Cheers

Randy

[Daniel Cadieux]

Hi there Tammy. Welcome to BPN!! I agree with Randy's points (especially to see t least one bird), except that I would have put the nests lower in the frame. Reason: the holes are pointing up so it would give room for the potential birds to go in and out from.