Jabiru in flight

[ChasMcRae]

Early morning image of Jabiru flying by in Pantanal ,Brazil area.

Chas. McRae

amera Model: Canon EOS-1D Mark II
Firmware: Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows
Owner: Charles W. Mc Rae
Date/Time: 2005:08:01 17:33:18
Shutter speed: 1/1600 sec
Aperture: 5.6
Exposure mode: Av
Flash: Off
Metering mode: Multi-segment
ISO: 800
Focal length: 840mm
Image size: 1024 x 724
Rotation: none
Color space: sRGB
Color profile: sRGB IEC61966-2.1

[Doug Brown]

Neat bird Charles! The exposed body under the near wing looks like you spent a little time in highlight recovery mode. I might brighten the rest of the bird a bit. Thanks for posting!

[Ramon M. Casares]

Love the pose and the magical light, eye contact is great and colours fantastic, I would try to recover or tone down a bit the hot area right where the wing starts. Still this a dream shot! COngratulations!

[Lance Peters]

Well done - love the colours and the pose. Looks a tad dark on my screen.

Congrats.

[ChasMcRae]

I tried not to abnormally lighten it , to accentuate the early yellowish light. To me that was part of the look.

Also see the area that beginning to blow out at base of wing, and yet again the yellowish glow there was natural. Could back off a little there.

Thanks for looking and this trip was my first with digital equipment.

Chas.

[Juan Aragonés]

Fantastic pose and light. The dark background and the OOF green stuff at the bottom works fine in my opinion. I like a lot that warms colors, red on the neckand yellow-golden on the body and the great eye contact. It seems slightly soft in my monitor and I think that another round of USM mask would improve the image for web presentation. Did you sharpen the image before or after image resize for post?

[Glenn Bartley]

Really cool image Chas. The light is just great.

[ChasMcRae]

I only sharpened the eye significantly. Very minimal sharpen body and some more could be done. Feel free to experiment. All sharpening done as last step in process.
Thanks for comment-part of the "luck" with this shot was it being at eye level and a steady flight path since I saw it coming.
Chas.

[Juan Aragonés]

Charles here is my repost (just minor changes in sharpening). I added a selective USM mask only to the bird (amount 183, radius 0,3 umbral 0) and noise reduction to the BG. I also used the clone tool to reduce some halos around the bird (you can see very easy if you compared face to face my version with your original). The amount of sharpenning has to be related to the image size. For web presentation you have to increase the amount of sharpenning for a better prsentation but, of course, that is a matter of personal taste;)

[ChasMcRae]

Thanks for juicing up the sharpening. The more I juiced it up the more "bill shine" I had,so I elected to back off slightly.
Thanks for popping it a little more.
Chas.