I warm welcome to BPN. It is a fun place to learn and enjoy this wonderful hobby.
A nice merganser to start out with. Sharp and well exposed, maybe just a smidge hot in the whites at the tail, but overall good. Your light angle was well over your left shoulder, which does throw the neck and breast into shadow. The head turn is nice, and that helps with the light angle. If it were any further away, the shadowing on the forehead would be a real problem.
You need some CW rotation of the image, as your bird is swimming uphill. I would guess 3-5 degrees would do it.
I think the composition is good, from a personal standpoint, I might add just a tiny bit to the rear, and a bit more in front as well.
Here is your merganser with some CW rotation. It only took 2.5 % to level it out. It of course made the crop even tighter, so more canvas might be needed.
One thing that will help you is to have a double bubble level in the hot shoe, so you can keep the camera as level as possible. It happens to everyone, but you want to get it as close as you can in the camera.
Cheers
Randy
PS: When I looked at it again, I think it actually could go another .5% or so CW, but you get the idea!
Last edited by Randy Stout; 06-20-2009 at 11:29 AM.
When you make changes on an image, please be sure to do it as a repost, and don't replace the original image. Otherwise, folks who join the thread later can't figure out what went on.
Welcome to BPN, Johannes! Nice first post, I like the angle and eye contact. I agree regarding clockwise rotation and might increase contrast a bit since it looks a bit flat on my monitor. It would have been even stronger with the sun behind you. You could try to tone down the highlights on the back part a bit and maybe sharpen some more. Keep them coming!
Howdy and welcome to BPN. I was in Icleand two years ago. Very nice.
I do like the head angle and the sharpness.
All good suggestions above but everyone missed a very important (starting) point. The image looked much too bright to me so I brought it into CS3 to level it--it looked great at 1.75 degrees CW. After opening Levels I noted that the image was in fact well over-exposed. There were lots of flashing pixels when I held down the ALT key and clicked on the Highlight slider. And the histogram was well clipped. There are lots of good tutorials on saving the whites in Educational Resources, but it seems as if you need help with exposure and histograms. I would strongly recommend our Digital Basics File plus my CD book, ABP II. See the home paage for details.
BIRDS AS ART Blog: great info and lessons, lots of images with our legendary BAA educational Captions; we will not sell you junk. 30+ years of long lens experience/e-mail with gear questions.
BIRDS AS ART Online Store: we will not sell you junk. 35 years of long lens experience. Please e-mail with gear questions.
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Red-Breasted Merganser
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