Sunlit GBH w Dark Mangrove BG

[Noel Heustis]

I have been trying to get shots of subjects in sunlight with BGs in the dark and vice versa. Happy to report I’m getting both. This GBH foraged around me for a good 40 minutes in full sunlight and then walked straight in front of the dark mangroves as the Sun was going down. The scene took my breath away as I was watching it unfold.

Below are short rundowns of settings and my post processing:

ISO 200
AV ƒ/6.3
TV 1/1000

Canon 7Dii and 100-400mm ii
Focal Length 400mm
Manual Exposure / Servo / Full Frame / Back Button Focus

Processed in DPP4 and PScc

Thanks for taking the time to look. As always, comments are appreciated.

[William Dickson]

Pretty cool man. Its looking real good. The dk BG sure shows the bird real well. Nice details on the bird and a lovely pose. I like your chosen crop, but, I think a landscape look would also look good with partial reflection.

Well done

Will

[John Mack]

This is really cool. Has a fine art look to it. The bird really pops against all the dark surrounding it.

[Allen Sparks]

Hi Noel,
This does have a unique feel to it with that dark BG enveloping the bird. An intriguing image.
Allen

[Daniel Cadieux]

Beautiful mood. Glad you went vertical to include the reflection. I do see that you rotated the image to straighten it out....you then forgot to crop out, or fill in, the resulting corners all around.

[gail bisson]

This is really nice Noel.
Great mood and feel to this. I am on a laptop traveling so it is hard for me to really critique properly!
If not against your ethics I would get rid of the hint of vegetation in the black BG behind the bird.
I like the crop as well.
Gail

[Noel Heustis]

Thank you for your thoughts and comments.

Daniel - yes...embarrassing..I did rotate it and forgot to fill in the triangles. I reworked it and filled in those triangles using content aware fill.

As most of the comments stated, I too thought it had a really cool mood or feel to it, and I thought the dark BG made it pop as John and Will said. Gail - I have no ethical conundrum cleaning up an image the way you have suggested. My goal is to learn to make and present great images, I will try that.

I'm reposting my rework with the content aware fill. I tried darkening the image a bit more. Somewhere in the process I managed to decrease the file size by a lot, and I think it affected the image quality (learning as I go here).

[Giovanni Frescura]

Good. I like more repost..more details..good more dark! Well done !

[Arthur Morris]

Love it. With my dark monitor problems I am wondering how it would look with the bird opened up a bit. I would definitely go to 2x3.

with love, artie