Howling At The Moon... Actually Whistling

[Joseph Przybyla]

I captured this image of a Black-bellied Whistling Duck at Circle B Bar Reserve in Polk County, Florida. Comments and critique welcomed and appreciated. Thank you for viewing.

Nikon D7000
Nikon 80-400mm F/4.5-5.6 VRII AF-S ED image captured at 400mm
1/1600 F/5.6 Matrix Metering EV +1 ISO 800 AWB, camera supported by a monopod
Post processed in Lightroom Classic CC, Photoshop CC 2019 and Neat Image for noise reduction
Cropped for composition and presentation

[Bill Dix]

Great pose, and beautifully framed in that nice tree. Well captured.

[annmpacheco]

Hi Joe,
I like the composition, terrific pose but it appears soft and the head is not sharp. Nice to see the puff of clouds.

[William Dickson]

Very pleasing to the eye, a nice looking image. Have to agree with Ann regarding the sharpness on the bird.

Will

[John Mack]

Love the title of this one. Very neat frame of this duck. Like the tree with all the green and that whistling pose.

[Isaac Grant]

The pose and the framing are killer Joe. You captured this one even better than the photo I posted where I got them whistling but the head was not all the way back like you have here. I love the clouds which break up the blue sky. Really this is one of the best Whistling Duck images I have seen.

I agree with Ann and William re the bird being a touch soft but I think this is due to a processing issue. I also feel your white balance is too cool which caused the rich reddish tones of the bird to be muted. I did the following.

In curves I put the white point dropper on the whitest part of the white clouds which worked wonders and warmed up the image at the same time as adding a bit more contrast. Then I ran some Detail extractor at 30% opacity on the bird only. Ran a touch of noise reduction on the bird and Smart Sharpened at 100% and .5. While not perfect I think if you go back to the RAW you should be able to correct these things. Note that this file was huge for some reason and I had to reduce the size and also the quality to 67% to meet the size restrictions so there is likely some loss in image quality.

[Arthur Morris]

I love, love, love this image as noted above by many.; the image design and pose are spectacular. It would be worth starting over and following Isaac's advice. In addition, I'd love to take a crack at the RAW file.

with love, arite

[Joseph Przybyla]

Thanks everyone for viewing, commenting and suggesting improvements. As suggested I worked up the original RAW image again. I changed the white balance from auto to cloudy in Lightroom. I worked on sharpening the image more aggressively and added a little clarity to the bird. Here is a post of the edited image.

[Arthur Morris]

Looks good but I think that you can open up the rufous tones a bit more.

am

[David Salem]

This is fantastic Joe and I think it's one of your best posts ever. It has all the elements of a great image. Pose, action, colors, details and a beautiful scene. Well done

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

Lovely Setting. I like the green colors surrounding the bird.

May a touch of Yellow in the image.

TFS