Pelican Yoga

[Jake Levin]

From the 2016 San Diego trip, when I was still figuring out how to use a digital camera after obstinately sticking with Fuji Provia and a Nikon F5 ever since high school. By pure chance he had his wing in the exact same plane as his head and bill, so I got some unexpected feather detail there. I'm hoping to have another chance at a pose like this! No, it's not a vertical turned on its side by mistake, he really did have his neck all the way out and sideways to preen under the wings.

7D mkII, 300mm f/4 IS, 1.4x TC III
1/1600 @ f/8, ISO 400
ACR/Photoshop, minimal adjustments, mostly NR on the dark blue background

[Jonathan Ashton]

I think you have a good image here but I don't think you have embedded the SRGB profile in your converted image, so when I check the image in PSCC the colours are different to those presented on the web. When you Save for Web was Convert to SRGB ticked??

[Glenn Pure]

Jake, I think the pose is wonderful and your framing and composition are a great artistic treatment. Colours on the bird are really striking and background is nice and neutral. Overall the image does look a little soft to me though. Maybe it's just the small size. How does the RAW look for detail.

[Jake Levin]

It's definitely the small file size; the raw file is bang on from what I can tell, and I'm not exactly cavalier when it comes to sharpness. I've blown it up 16x20 on enhanced matte, and the first thing I thought was "this could be twice as big and not lose any detail"! I'll see if I can put up a better file, since there also seemed to be a colour issue with the first JPG.

Edited to add: here's the same picture with a bit of output sharpening done. Hopefully the colours are correct this time.

[Jonathan Ashton]

A great shot but I think the image processing is slightly awry, the histogram is compressed at both ends.