Are you taking a photo of me?

[BRKnudsen]

Hello, my first post in this forum, any c&c are welcome and very much appreciated, especially pp advices, thanks.



The settings; iso 1600, f/8.0 1/250 sec 560 mm (200-400 mm VR, 1.4X TCII, D700, AF-S, VR-on) Evening, partially clouded sky, sunset. I did not use a hide, only my tripod.

[Fabs Forns]

Hi Br, big welcome to BPN, looking forward to see you improve your skills.
Amazing results for ISO 1600.
Nice wing stretch and reasonably sharp. The sand has a bluish cast due probably to the light conditions and the bade of grass shooting out of the bird's head is very distracting. If it's OK with your post processing ethics, I'd remove it.
I think the image could be cropped from top and bottom and some off the left for web presentation, although it would be OK for a print.

Keep them coming.

[Kim Rollins]

Great capture of this one!
Exposure is good, very good.
You asked for advice and especially PP advice. It is hard to give pp steps when the software you have is not known. Speaking PS I would say because of your excellent capture this would all be easy and simple;
I would adjust contrast, raise shadows, desaturate blue in face of owls right, clean up eyes as there seems to be some lights and colors there that are distracting to me, do some final sharpening for image and its size.

I would also have the wind blow away the distracting grass Fabs mentioned. ;)

Repost -



Edit - Looking now I think I should have not increased the contrast of bg but owl only.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Welcome to BPN Benjamin, quite a lovely subject you present us to start! Good advice from above. I would only suggest that if you are going to rework the colours on this image you might as well go all the way and get rid of the blue cast altogether. I destaurated the blue and cyan channels completely, then in "Selective colors" gave a bit of yellow and magenta to the "white" channel to give some colour back to the sand and BG. There could be a bit more tweaking to do, but this is a quick and dirty version to show the power of post-processing in PS. I didn't touch the blade of grass above the head, but Kim's repost shows how well it can be done.

Overall a great start, and I'm looking forward to more from you!! :-)

[BRKnudsen]

Hi Br, big welcome to BPN, looking forward to see you improve your skills.
Amazing results for ISO 1600.
Nice wing stretch and reasonably sharp. The sand has a bluish cast due probably to the light conditions and the bade of grass shooting out of the bird's head is very distracting. If it's OK with your post processing ethics, I'd remove it.
I think the image could be cropped from top and bottom and some off the left for web presentation, although it would be OK for a print.

Keep them coming.

Hi, thanks for your feedback, I will have to work on the colors also commented by Daniel and Kim, well the grass straw in the head ;-) 'quite charming' I agree. I am using Adobe LR2 and sometimes CS4, but recently changed from aperture, well to be honest I find it challenging to find the right workflow. I like the logic structure of LR2 and the easy way of managing the photos its integration with CS4 and also photomatrix,which I use sometimes. On the other hand I do not know if there is a preferable raw converter for Nikon NEF, some people write that Phase one pro or NX2 is the way to go. Until now I am just trying to find the right work flow, but any recommendations are surely appreciated, thanks

Cheers
/Benjamin