Eurasian Wigeon

[Ed Vatza]

Image made today on one of the North Shore (NJ) lakes. It seems almost every year a single Eurasian Wigeon makes it's way to the Jersey shore. I made some nice (to my eye!) portraits and several images similar to this one. The other similar images have the wings lower and the entire face exposed but I really like the mystery created by having the face partially hidden by the wing and the eye looking over it.

Canon 50D; Canon 300 2.8 w/ 2x TC; tripod-mounted

1/250 sec at f/5.6; ISO 100; 0 EV; Sunny WB; FL 600mm (Effective FL 960mm)

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great find and wing flap. I like the eye contact and it looks as if it needs a bit CW rotation. I probably would have used a higher ISO setting.

[Ed Cordes]

The peak of the eye is nice. The image seems to have a color cast on my monitor?

[Stu Bowie]

Lovely posture captured, and agree with the CW rotation.

[Tony Whitehead]

Love the streaked blur of the primaries but feel it would be stronger with better eye contact. Agree with Axel re CW rotation.

[Juan Aragonés]

I also see a color cast and agree about CW rotation. I like your idea a lot but I wish for just a litle more eye exposed to de observer

[Ed Vatza]

Thanks for the critiques folks. Much appreciated.

I can certainly do the CW rotation and will this evening when I return home from NYC and a visit to B&H. :D I'm off in about 30 minutes.

The color cast is another issue. I get this comment periodically on some of my images. I do not know where it comes from and more importantly, most of the time I don't see it. So I am not even sure what to look for. Can those of you who comment on color cast, help me out? Where do you see it? What causes it? I do very little with color in PP. I generally use Lightroom and do modest PP.

Thanks.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Ed, in this case the strong colour cast is on the magenta side of things. There are a number ways to correct this...the easiest being correcting the WB in your favorite RAW converter (assuming you use RAW). You can also use "Color balance" in PS: slide the magenta cursor away from magenta (towards green) and see what happens :-) you may have to adjust other sliders until fully satisfied. I alo see you had the in-camera WB set to sunny...perhaps the sunlight was not strong enough in this case for that setting?

Another consideration is to make sure your monitor is properly calibrated - I say this because you mention this in the following quote of yours:

The color cast is another issue. I get this comment periodically on some of my images. I do not know where it comes from and more importantly, most of the time I don't see it.

[Ed Vatza]

First off, thank you Dan for the explanation of the color cast. That was very helpful.

Second, I am back from NYC and a visit to B&H. I have always ordered over the phone or internet. This was my first visit. What an operation!! But I did come back with a question (check under "Gear").

Anyway, I did the clockwise rotation. Then I also backed off on the WB and Tint in Lightroom. Any better???