Bald Eagle on Piling

[Terry Olmsted]

Samish Bay, Bow, Washiongton
February 3, 2008 Cloudy winter day
Canon XTi 400mm 5.6L 1/1600s f5.6 ISO 1600 ex.comp.+2

Working on reducing background noise - comments welcome, as always :)

[Lana Hays]

Terry
The good news is that you have a noise free BG.......bad news is that there appears to be noise or grain on the bird.......possibly from over sharpening. The edge around the eagle's head is blurry. Was this a large crop? As far as the composition goes I think that you need a little more room on the right and less room on the left. I think this image has potential but you may want to go back to the RAW image and start over.

[Terry Olmsted]

That's great news, Lana :) At least the bg noise was OK. I did fumble a bit on the main image - so I will go back to the drawing board! It was about a 70 percent crop, and with ISO 1600 probably doomed :(.
Thanks for the help!
Terry

[Todd Frost]

It looks like the bird is over sharpened to me as well. I see you are from up north of me. I live in the Auburn/Federal Way area. Looks like you are having fun up north.
Todd

[Terry Olmsted]

We are having fun - the Skagit and Samish flats are fantastic areas for everything from swans, snowgeese, and hawks to owls. Come on up. The only trick is timing - the number of sunny days has been considerably lower than last year!
Terry

[Jeff Nadler]

Hi Terry, I really like much of the composition of this image but as mentioned, three things immediately bothered me. The eagle has a mega-speckled look, like it is wearing glitter! As suggested, either due to sharpening, cropping, shadow/highlights or something. A major distraction unfortunately. The top of the bird's head looks unnaturally blurred as if some processing work was done in that area. Finally, the background dividing line of tone through the bird is not ideal. By getting a bit higher or bending down (with tripod) , you would have placed this line out of the bird's profile. If you can get rid of those sparkles and fix the blurred head issue, you have a substantially improved image.

[Terry Olmsted]

Thanks for the input, Jeff. Here is a revised version. I started over with minimal sharpening and used neat image for noise reduction.

[Jeff Nadler]

A definite improvement Terry. The strange head blurriness and sparkles are minimized, at just a bit of a loss of desired plumage detail. Much preferred to the initial post. I might suggest working just on the top of head and seeing if you can recover some detail.

[Terry Olmsted]

Try this, Jeff. I sharpened the upper head a bit more. Thanks for the help. The interaction is most appreciated.
Terry

[Jim Neiger]

Hi Terry,

You've received some great advice from Jeff and Lana. I really like the pose of the Eagle and the perch. They both have lots of character.

[Jeff Nadler]

I like this one. Nice pursuit of processing following up!

[Terry Olmsted]

Thanks very much for your time and advice, Jeff