A Shorebird Farewell
Funny after spending a couple of hours on the estuary with few near bird sightings, how when on way back on time schedule a little beauty is seen, friendly and saying "Here I Am" !!!!
Banded Dotterel ( Charadrius bicinctus) New Zealand Endemic but migrates to Australia,
Pentax K10d with Tamron 70-300 @ 300mm plus Tamron 1.4 TC.
Handheld 1/1000 Sec @ F5.6. Minus 0.5 EV. Multi segment metering. 400 ISO.
Comments and reposts welcome.
Ian McHenry
http://www.pbase.com/ianmc/wetland__seabirds_of_nz
Hi Ian- Great bird! Love the Dotterals. Overall I like the composition and habitat, and the eye contact is good. The image has an overall colour cast (green?) and I think needs some brightening up with Levels/Curves. Since you invited reposts, here's a quick retry. I ran curves in LAB colour mode to calibrate the whites to as close to 0,0 as I could get, then ran a round of noise reduction on the BG. Also removed the white patch in BG close to bird's breast as it was a bit distracting and sharpened up the bird a bit for good measure. I noted quite a lot of jpeg compression anomalies in the original image. If you resave the original at close to the BPN limit of 200k you will be able to reduce this to virtually zero.
Wonderful improved repost. Thanks John.
I liked the image before but unables to identify the "Je ne sais quoi"
Appreciate the detailed improvement process.
Will have another go at removing color cast and levels adjustment,etc.
Cheers: Ian Mc
PS. Might use your image as a colour balance reference for whites balance.
Great to see a NZ bird posting, Ian. John has covered the important points well and his repost illustrates that nicely. My suggestions are possibly a little CW rotation as the image seems to lean to the left a bit, and I would remove the OOF element transecting the upper right corner. Looking forward to more from the Mainland:)
Tony Whitehead
Visit my blog at WildLight Photography for latest news and images.
A Shorebird Farewell
Thanks Tony.
Have just done a re-edit based on John's whites.
As still a beginner to Photoshop probably extended process somewhat.
Cheers: Ian Mc
This looks pretty good for a beginner Ian! I see the repost image size is roughly the same as before. BPN allows up to 200k and your wiggle room is how much jpeg compression is applied to the saved image- the smaller the image the more compression and therefore the more it will show in the image. PM me if you need the method of how to achieve this.
Thanks John.
Much appreciated.
Cheers: Ian Mc
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