"More 'ay than Howl"

[John Chardine]

I lived in Newfoundland for 10 years and some there have a habit of adding an "H" to the beginning of words that start with a vowel, and dropping the first "H" in words that start with them. I digress .....

Yesterday I made a foray into our local saltmarsh called the "Tantramar" to find some Snowy Owls. While driving down the gravel road I saw a pleasant landscape image possibility with the golden-lit, round hay bales in the field next to the road. I had made several images before I realised that there was an owl standing on one of the bales in my viewfinder!

I cropped for a pano and removed some small OOF houses in the trees in the distance (didn't have releases anyway!). I tried to maintain the golden light of the afternoon but I'm afraid the Ps Save for Web and Devices has shifted the balance (despite having Proof setup set to Macintosh RGB).

(Apologies for posting first to Avian wild and free. I totally ignored the fact that hay bales are "hand of man"!)

Canon EOS 50D, 500/4
capture date: Friday, December 26, 2008 4:155 PM
exposure program: Manual
ISO speed: 400
shutter speed: 1/800
aperture: f4.0
exposure bias: +0.0
metering: Pattern
light source: Auto
flash: OFF

[Dave Phillips]

love the scene John, but is quite flat in Adobe RGB in most browsers.
Does this work(I am notorious for playing, hope it's ok).
Darkened the scene a bit, upped the golden glow and a bit of local sharpening....too much color?

[John Chardine]

I like the repost Dave. Many thanks for letting me see the forest for the trees so to speak. I quite often find I'm too close to the image and can see the possibilities. Also I tend to be constrained by trying to recreate what I saw, rather than to create an image. Having other eyes look at your images is one of many joys of BPN.

Good point about Adobe RGB. I will have to do some more reading but my assumption that what I see on my Mac monitor running Safari (which is colour corrected) is the same as most others viewing the image on other platforms will be revisited. I did find this rather interesting note and tried changing the gamma correction from 1.8 to 2.2 on my monitor and the Save for Web and Devices problem seemed to evaporate. I'll do more checking:

http://www.gballard.net/psd/saveforwebshift.html

[Dave Phillips]

good deal John, always "convert" to sRGB, many will assign sRGB and that is wrong. I have been away from the forums here for a while because I got fristrated with so many Adobe RGB images. Last night I viewed 6 images and 3 were in Adobe RGB. I too am using a color managed browser, but pull an iumage into PS and the truth is known

sorry for the soapbox and thank you for your true Ornithological expert contributions.........and the ay and howl is a super image

[Lana Hays]

John
I really like the "scene" in this one....and Dave has certainly perked it up. I struggle with the color as well. I didn't think I was doing anything any different but for some reason it's different on my computer. I'll have to look into this more. Well done!

[Maxis Gamez]

Hi Dave,

The re-post works very well for me and so is the composition. The owl looks out of focus in my monitor.

[Joe Senzatimore]

I too like the look of this. The owl does seem soft to me as well.

[John Chardine]

Thanks for good commentary. Yes, the subject is soft. It was a long distance off and the crop was pretty heavy so I was pushing the limits of the 50D. I'm pretty sure I got the focus correct. And I was "hand-holding" on top of the car and I would never win any biathlon medals. Those are my excuses anyway!

Viewing distance is an important factor and if I sit back and view the pano at an appropriate distance (say 0.5 metre or so), the subject does not look so bad.