The duck hunting season is upon us but individuals such as this female/immature Green-winged Teal are protected in our local Waterfowl Park. This is from a series of the same bird I made a few days after receiving the 50D. The light was great and the bird was very cooperative.
Full frame. Removed a few small specks from the water.
Canon EOS 50D, 500mm f4, 1.4tcII = 700mm
capture date: Monday, October 27, 2008 2:24:09 PM
exposure program: Aperture Priority
ISO speed: 640
shutter speed: 1/640
aperture: f5.6
exposure bias: +0.0
metering: Pattern
flash: OFF
Last edited by John Chardine; 11-11-2008 at 10:23 PM.
Reason: added editing detail
Very nice, love the water texture and the duck's feather detail, light is great and compo is nice but I wish the reflection wasn't clipped... and maybe, a bit more saturation on the reds could give this one more strenght! Congratulaitons on a very lovely shot!
Hi John, Like the look back head angle and the green speculum showing. The whole reflection would have been great. The single o-o-f body feather over the speculum is a small distraction.
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Lovely pose with excellent detail and eye contact. I agree the whole reflection would have been lovely but still a beautiful image and I love the touch of green being exposed. Thanks for sharing.
I'm so happy my eyes are bad John because I do not see anything wrong with this image but I'm a little partial to your work great shot and wish my 50-D will do as well, nicely done.
John, very nice! The reflection issue has been mentioned, but all else looks great :-) The speculum is very neat, and I also like the few drops of water sprinkled on the feathers near the tail.
Many thanks for all the valuable comments, as usual. BPN continues to be a huge and valuable learning experience for me.
I couldn't do much about the reflection because the image was full-frame but here is a repost with some Ps work. Essentially I selected a portion of the image using Quickmask with 0 hardness, created a layer which was flipped vertically, then applied a Gaussian Blur to the reflection. Then I cloned some water over the reflected head with about 20% strength. Also selectively sharpened some of the body feathers which were out of the DoF of the image.
This is pushing post-processing further than I normally go but it's fun and instructive making the attempt.
Wow, you did a fanastic job of re-inventing the ducky's head. Amazing. I meant to suggest that you might have tried to include it at the time of capture. And thanks for the kind words about BPN.
BIRDS AS ART Blog: great info and lessons, lots of images with our legendary BAA educational Captions; we will not sell you junk. 30+ years of long lens experience/e-mail with gear questions.
BIRDS AS ART Online Store: we will not sell you junk. 35 years of long lens experience. Please e-mail with gear questions.
Check out the new SONY e-Guide and videos that I did with Patrick Sparkman here. Ten percent discount for BPN members,
late fall Green-wing
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