Cormorant Portrait
For those of you familiar with Huntington Beach State Park in S. Carolina this Cormorant is a popular attraction of the park. One of the rangers there told me that they believed this cormorant had lost its ability to keep its wings properly oiled. So consequently it stays right by the causeway most of the time to fish and it frequently gets out of the water to dry off. When it is drying off you can walk right up to it.
Canon 10D
Canon 75-300 IS @ 75mm
ISO 100
1/500sec @ F4.5
Handheld
corrected?
Those darn clone marks! I always find them AFTER I post... Hmmn.
Great sharpness, light and eye contact. I like it a lot. The light areas in the head and neck looks very light to my taste and I suggest it with the "underexpose" tool. Of course, I am not familiar with this species so I really do not know how does it looks. Regarding the composition, you have too much room at the top of the frame from my poit of view.
As you said, there are some cloning marks on the BG and I have to add that your sensor needs some cleaning job because you have some dust bunnies on it. Here is a simple trick to check our processing job and an easy way to see that kind of hiddens "marks" on an image. I do it a lot and it works. The only thing you have to do is add a layer mask and adjust the brightness and contrast to extreme values. This way, you will made the cloning marks, dust bunnies or gaussian blur banding very apparent and your work to fix them would be easier. Here I used the following values: brigthness = 67, contrast = 100.
Hope this helps
Juan
Thanks for the tips Juan. There sure is a lot to figure out with digital imaging. I learn something new every day. I appreciate the help.
God bless,
Chris
Curious why you leave so much room on top?
Great tip by Juan. That should go into the Educational Resources Forum.
What I found helps with cloning marks is first to clone the area several times with a small clone brush and then going over the same area again with a much larger brush, e.g. 45 and then 100.
By the way, I think I've read somewhere that Cormorants in general can't oil their feathers as well. Hence, they need to dry out by spreading their wings and sunning themselves. JR
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