No head, no eye contact, no low angle... but I love this image and the reason is just the fantastic light and the textures that it created on the feathers of this squacco heron. I am sure that some of you would prefer the same image with a neat head between the wings, me too, but I couldn´t get the head. I have several images of the same series with the wings folded and with the head very visible but they are simply, boring, lacking interest. I decided to save this image and do not deleted it. At home, I opened the file in CS4 and, wow loved the light at the first second.
Almost full frame, Nikon D300 AFS Nikkor 500VR handheld from the car, manual exposure, 1/ f7,1/1250s ISO640
Processing job: one RAW conversion, levels adjustment, a touch of saturation boost, selective remove of the blue cast in the wings (uuuumm, not sure, but I think that I like most with the blue cast in the wings), and sharpening to the bird. No noise reduction. Small crop at the left and top of the frame
More images of squacco herons in my blog
Last edited by Juan Aragonés; 07-26-2009 at 09:00 AM.
Photography is the capturing of light, in all its varied guises. You have done just that here. The spot light like effect and backlighting is great. It reminds of what I try with my macro images.
From a comp. standpoint, I might crop up a bit from the bottom.
Thanks for the suggestions to everyone. My intention was to crop a bit at the top and at the left (in the original file) to place the bird more at the upper left corner but I have to agree with your suggestions. More croping from the bottom and to remove the distracting stone. It makes sense to me :-)
The backlighting through the wings works so well in this Juan. It enhances the different layers of feathers. I also like the small puff of dust at the feet. Your recrop works well too. Well spotted and captured.
Hi Juan,
I really like the idea and love the splashes of light going through the feathers. The surroundings however are a bit distracting too me and as such I would go for Ramon's repost at least a version like it, maybe I would play around with the idea of increasing contrast at the black point a bit more. In this way all the nice features of the shot are increased and all the distraction removed. Cool species BTW.
Beautiful, loved the setting Brother.. the repost works well, also Ramons post looks artistic but would prefer it with just about showing a little detail of the surrounding... congrats..
Hi all and thanks a lot for your comments and suggestions. Ramón, you went very far in the processing job to my taste (it looks a bit unnatural) but I like the idea you are suggesting and I will see how it works in this image :)-) Perhaps something between both images is a the better choice ;)