Snowy Owl (c), 1st Avian post and an Introduction.

[Craig Thompson]

Hello everyone,

I have been a long time lurker @ this site, and recently became a "dues paying member"!

I have been a serious amateur "birder" for many years, but I feel my attempts @ bird "photography" have been hampered somewhat by my lack of longer, or AF lenses. (...my longest is a 20 year old 300mm f2.8 (MF)) Because of those limitations, many of my better shots of larger, wary, or hard to approach species, are of "Captive" birds taken at workshops presented at a local "Wildlife Rehabilitation Center"!

In recent years, since I moved to digital camera bodies and with the 1.5x bump in focal length they provide, I have experienced a "little" more success in capturing images of some of the wildlife and "wild" bird subjects I love. I am looking forward to posting some of them here and hopefully learning how to improve upon my technique, presentation and composition!

I have posted a few "new" images in the "macro" forum, but I thought I would start my first Avian post with the image I chose to be my "avatar".

This is a favorite image of mine! It is a captive, injured rehab bird, whose injuries prevent it form being returned to the wild. I really like the "portrait" composition and animated expression or behavior the bird is exhibiting! (..actually, I think she was just bored & yawning!! :D ;) ) I do like the fact that it doesn't seem to have the "posed" or "static" look that many "portrait" shots of captive birds can have.

I was also very pleased with the the look of the "rim", or back light lighting! I chose a low shooting position where the snow covered bg was also mostly in shade. This allowed me to shoot the subject against a bg with some color instead of a featureless, blown out white!

Shot on Fuji 100 slide film, consumer scanned onto "photo CD". Equipment; Nikon F3 /w motordrive, 300mm f2.8 (mf) lens, Sekonic spot meter, 1/250th sec. @ f5.6, gitzo tripod. I spot metered the shaded portion of the birds breast and opened up appx. 2/3rds to 1 full stop.

I attempted something different with this image when preparing and converting it for posting. I used the convert to sRGB & "save for web" option in CS3. Since I process and view my work in CS 3, on a 24 inch iMac, and Adobe RGB color space, it seems that some of my images appear a bit "dark", or lacking in contrast when posted, even though they look good on "My" screen! (I'm not really sure what I'm doing with regards to this kind of image conversion, but I thought I'd give it a try and see if the posted image would be a bit more "cross platform" or "web" compatible when viewed with different computers and browsers!) I hope it works!! :confused:;):D

addendum; When I checked the preview image before posting it, it appears my web conversion attempt picked up, or created quite a bit more "noise" than I noticed in the regular, "Adobe RGB jpg version. Please keep that in mind when you critique it!!

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Craig, welcome aboard. My story is similar to yours too. My longest is 300 f/4 non-IS. But I picked up a 1.6x crop dslr last year and a 1.4x too. That gave me an opportunity to get into bird photography....something I like because I have been a birder for many years. My philosophy is not to let the equipment restrict us too much. There are different but good bird images that can be made at focal lengths less than 500mm with digital slrs.

I like this image a lot. The open beak gives it a different look. Thx for sharing.

KD

[Randy Stout]

Craig:

Welcome to the Avian forum!

Your choice of positioning to get the BG to your taste was effective, as it adds more interest and helps the white bird stand out.

You mentioned the noise. The reflection off the snow has given the bird a bit of a blue color cast. I might also consider adding a bit of canvas on the top and to the right, as I find the composition a bit tight in those areas.

Rim lighting can be quite dramatic, but I do wish the eye and open mouth were better illuminated here.

Look forward to more!

Randy

[Harshad Barve]

Welcome to Avian Craig
Randy has covered techs very well here , nice first image to start with
TFS

[Lance Peters]

Welcome to the BPN Family - Love these guys hope to get to see one in the flesh some day.
Ditto the above comments - noted that you like the colour in the BG - at the least though I would remove the blue cast from the bird itself.

Here is some really quick ROUGH changes (In a car travelling and its kinda hard to make any really accurate selctions on my laptop)
Left the BG blue seeing as you liked it.

Used this method here - http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...ead.php?t=7752 to reduce the colour cast and then used the history brush to paint the BG back in.

Selected the mouth area and used a little shadow/Highlight, selected the eye area and played with the levels a tad.

You CAN do much better than this (some blue tinges around the eye and rhs where my selections were off)

Any better???

[denise ippolito]

Craig, Welcome to BPN and a really nice first post in Avian. I chose a Snowy Owl as my first Avian post also. I just love these guys and photographing them is a real treat. You captured a great moment w/ the open mouth. Randy gave a very detailed critique and Lance's repost really did make an improvement. Nice image and welcome aboard!

[Arthur Morris]

Hey Craig, Nice meeting you and welcome. Love the yawn and prefer the less blue re-post. I don't like signatures on beautiful images but hate drop-shadowed ones

And remember, there are many times when an intermediate telephoto lens if the right tool for the job and and 800 is dead in the water.....

[Lance Peters]

Another option - IMHO - convert to black and white - then use the History brush to paint back in the colours.

[Doug Brown]

Welcome to BPN Craig! Good points by everyone above. Look forward to more of your images!

[Daniel Belasco]

Welcome Craig!
This is a very beautiful shot.
I perfer the OP as the reposts have an unnatural eye.
Overall a very appealing image as I've never seen one quite like this.
I don't like captive shots generally, but this is an exception and thanks for your honesty.

[Craig Thompson]

Welcome Craig!
This is a very beautiful shot.
I perfer the OP as the reposts have an unnatural eye.
Overall a very appealing image as I've never seen one quite like this.
I don't like captive shots generally, but this is an exception and thanks for your honesty.

Thank you Daniel,

The look of the "eye" was my biggest problem with the reposts as well, but since they were only "Quicky" fix versions as stated when posted, I only took into consideration, in general, how I felt about the way it looked and "felt", being rendered as a whiter, more neutral color. In truth,.. I liked it!

So,.. I figured I'd take a shot at fixing it myself!

A repost will follow!

Let me know what you think of it!

Craig

[Craig Thompson]

Thanks to everyone who posted a comment.

I will have to do some research into optimizing images for posting on the web. The sRGB version didn't convert or post well. (...overall, it was darker, the blues shifted color a bit and it is definitely a lot noisier)

Initially, I was surprised at the comments about the blue color in the Owl. I always liked that about this image. Considering that the Snowy is an "Arctic", cold climate bird, I always felt the blue lent a "feeling" of cold to the image.

However,.. after seeing the reposts, I have to admit, I do like the image better with the shaded portion of the bird, lightened a bit and rendered a little more neutral.

So, here's "my" repost. (...I do still like the blue so I didn't go quite as neutral as the examples posted.) I will be interested in hearing how this is received!

This is from the "Adobe RGB" version, I lightened the shaded portion of the bird, brightened the eye and open beak a bit more as well. Then I did a simple "save as" to .jpg and posted. It looks a lot lighter and "whiter" to me in the preview. (..couldn't predict how it will render on a pc's monitor! ;) )

Thanks again to everyone for the suggestions and advice!

Craig