Spearfishing in the Glades

[Michael Pancier]

This guy gave us a nice show with the bluegill.

1d Mark II
400 5.6L
f/8
1/1000
ISO 400
No Flash

Manual mode - + 1 1/3 off sky.
cropped to eliminate reeds. Cloned out same.
Darkened background with Nik Viveza...

[Randy Stout]

Michael:

Beautifully captured. I love the detail in the birds eye, the pink mouth and the poor unfortunate bluegill. Excellent choice on f stop to get as much DOF possible and still maintain sharpness. The tall vertical crop accentuates the birds long neck.

Really no issues for me on this one. (Ok, I wish the bluegill was right side up :) )

Thanks for sharing!

[denise ippolito]

Michael, Wonderful capture! great details and sharpness-love the open mouth-Well done

[Bonnie Block]

This is an awesome image, Michael. Fantastic eye contact and colors. My only nit here is that there seems to be some artifacts showing in the bg--and maybe some over run from cloning--
Pretty exciting catch!

[Tony Whitehead]

Superb pose and I like the colour match between the fish and the bird's eye/forehead. There is a noise issue in the BG - it seems restricted to certain areas and is, I suspect, related to the colours/tones Viveza has adjusted and been accentuated by sharpening.

[Arthur Morris]

Hey Michael. This is your best bird image ever, at least of the ones that I have seen. Love the sharpness thoughout, the fish, the open bill, and the great d-o-f.

You need to re-do and repost the image as their is some BKGR-work spillover onto the bird, fuzziness along the top of the crown and the back of the lower neck are evident.

[Michael Pancier]

Hey Michael. This is your best bird image ever, at least of the ones that I have seen. Love the sharpness thoughout, the fish, the open bill, and the great d-o-f.

You need to re-do and repost the image as their is some BKGR-work spillover onto the bird, fuzziness along the top of the crown and the back of the lower neck are evident.

thanks artie. I'm going to try to spend more time on it. It was a little late when I worked on this and I probably got double vision.

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

Fabulous action Michael. Absolutely perfect. :)

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Very cool image, I agree regarding artifacts around the bird and partial BG noise and would love to see a repost since it is such a great image.

[Michael Pancier]

here's another try....

how's this?

[Dave Mills]

Michael, a real beauty! Good job on the cleanup...

[Arthur Morris]

Way better, but still a bit of funkiness along the bird/BKGR areas, esp. on the crown. I may be able to help. Assuming that you selected the BKGR at some point, how did you make your selection.

ps: It would really help for learning here if you posted the ORIG as an 800 JPEG.

[Michael Pancier]

Way better, but still a bit of funkiness along the bird/BKGR areas, esp. on the crown. I may be able to help. Assuming that you selected the BKGR at some point, how did you make your selection.

ps: It would really help for learning here if you posted the ORIG as an 800 JPEG.

Perhaps I've been doing this the hard way. The background color is pretty consistent. So I simply used the paint and clone tool to remove the schmutz. There seemed to be some brownish grasses that blended with the bird's feather behind the bird's head and the fish so on those I just zoomed in and tried to clean it up the best I could. I'm sure there's an easier way...

once I cleaned it up, I used Viveza to select the background color to darken it a bit.

When I get home I'll post the original and hopefully can get some ideas on the best way to clean up the pic.

[Michael Pancier]

Per Artie's Request, here is the Raw untouched image.

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks Michael, I made the selection of the BKGR with the Magic Wand and then used Refine Edge at the defaults with feathering set at .5 pixles. This enabled me to do Protect and Defend cloning (protecting the bird). I used the Clone Stamp at 50% as the feathers were not prefectly selected. I think that it worked pretty well. I could do better with the full sized TIFF of course, and much better still if I ever learned to use the Fluid Mask plug-in....

IAC, all of the techniques above (plus tons more) are inlcuded in the latest update of our Digital Basics File: http://www.birdsasart.com/digitalbasics.htm

[Arthur Morris]

ps: I tried to avoid the total grey BKGR and there might be a great version with the BKGR Gaussian blurred rather than cloned. (I realize that that might shock some folks)!

[susanschermer]

Congratulations, Michael. I've seen and captured many images of this behavior, but this one is totally wonderful. I like your cloning job on the BG.