Blue-winged Teal

[Anthony Barsotti]

I saw this male Blue-winged Teal along with a female today and decided to see if I could stake out a spot to get them to swim by. After an hour or so of creeping through the mud, sure enough they swam right past me. Shot with my Canon 1DX with the 600mm f/4 IS II and the 1.4X Extender III wide open at f/5.6 1/1000 sec and ISO 1000. Cropped for better composition, clone stamped a distracting dark reflection out of the background, applied NR to the background in Photoshop and applied an unsharp mask to the bird. Also added a saturation mask on the head to bring out the colors a bit more. Thanks in advance!

[Arthur Morris]

Nice pose and REFL. And the feather is neat. The EXP is good. There is too much foreground. But the biggest problem is that the head is not sharp, likely due to motion blur.

with love, artie

[Anthony Barsotti]

Thanks Artie, I don’t think it’s motion blur because zoomed at 100% I’m not seeing any smearing or anything that would indicate that but it’s definitely not as tack sharp as I’d like it to be. There’s a frame before this that seems marginally sharper to my eye, might give that one a try instead.

[Joseph Przybyla]

Hi Anthony, beautiful bird, I think Blue-winged Teal are quite striking. I second Artie's comments. Something you might keep in mind is that when capturing images of birds on the water that many times atmosphere (water vapor rising) will prevent sharp images. Big telephoto lenses enhances what the eye does not see. It is a major problem in Florida where I live. I think I have nailed a image in the field only to get home and look at it on the computer to see it is soft and then know it was atmosphere or heat shimmer. Thank you for sharing.

[Anthony Barsotti]

I was thinking that might be the case, when I look at it at 100% it’s not really like it’s out of focus, it’s just lacking micro contrast or something. I guess at the very least it’s sharp enough for Instagram.

[John Mack]

Pretty neat frame of this teal. The feather is a plus. The low angle and reflection are nice as well.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Hey Anthony, beautiful scene of a striking duck! I love the feather, how cool. It looks properly focused but I suppose it could have a bit better fine detail. The many white spots in the water are unfortunate, but likely hard to avoid at that spot. Keep them coming, it's a lovely image!

[Isaac Grant]

I love Blue-winged Teals and have only had one good chance at shooting them. I like the action you have here and I like the feather. Also like how the teal blends into the water color. For me the image is under exposed, I would lift the exposure at least 1/4 percent and see what that does. Might be best to select the feather and the crescent and then inverse the selection and lift the exposure on all but those. Then I would also warm the image up some. An easy way is to use the Photo Filter > Warming Filter 85 at about 10% and see if that helps. Then I would also crop 16:9 to get rid of some of the dead space.

[Anthony Barsotti]

I'll definitely give these a try, thanks as always for yours and everyone else's awesome feedback. Really appreciate it!

[Dorian Anderson]

Beautiful bird with an interesting pose. However, I think the crop is way to wide. Wide crops only work when the negative space adds to the image; here is detracts because of all the distracting white things on the water. Light was clearly super flat, so the color looks OK given that limitation.

[arash_hazeghi]

very nice dark mood, I like how he is grabbing the feather. I find the white stuff in the FG a bit distracting. the focus is tack sharp from here but I think because of the crop there isn't a lot of fine feather details on the head and body.

TFS