I was out on Ocean Shores beaches this week braving the deluge of rain. During a few breaks in the weather some of the raptors came out seeking a sanderling or dunlin meal. This Peregrine falcon was kind enough to do a slow launch into the wind for me!
Local biologists have been tagging many of the raptors in this area.
Olympus OMD EM1, Sigma 300-800, 300mm 1/500 sec. f/5.6
Levels, curves, noise and sharpening done. One branch removed in PS.
Jonathan, you did well with such harsh light, if the sun was at your back it would have been much better.
Next time if you can post bigger so we can see all the details, next time a higher f stop would benefit also.
The darks are o.k. but a few of your whites are a bit hot but you can recover those in post.
Thanks Tim,
I thought I needed to size the picture at 800 across in order to post. I'll try larger next time. I thought I had kept a keen eye on the histogram (it was on full time in the viewfinder) but somehow the nearly blown log got away from me. Rookie mistake. I recovered it as much as I think I could using the burn in tool. Is there a better method I should have used?
I thought I could do better with this photo in PP incorporating some of the suggestions Tim made. I used a variable ND function after doing a shadows/highlight adjustment to reduce the exposure of the log rather than attempting to burn it in.
Please let me know whether this second try looks better. There is sort of a greenish line at the top of the log. Not sure whether this is caused by the post processing.
A large version of the picture can be seen at http://jonathanspool.zenfolio.com/p1029826770#h8648abd0 if you would like to see greater detail
Yes in some ways it looks better, the green line your talking about is defringing and can be removed from the raw file in PS
under lens corrections / color / defringe.
I hope this helps.