Would you consider this a nature and wildlife photo

[Desmond Chan]

Interested in your answer. If you prefer, a simple "yes" or "no" is all right, too.

Thank you!

[Dave Mills]

Yes, There are elements of both in the image...

[Desmond Chan]

I forgot to add: would the post-processing/effect applied affect your answer?

[Don Thompson]

It wouldn't affect my answer at all; in my opinion it would fall into the nature and wildlife category.

I like the processing.

[david cramer]

I would consider this nature photography (provided the bird isn't stuffed:)), but in my system I label images with some form of out of the ordinary post processing as "fine art" nature and wildlife, and I post those in a separate gallery. This helps to identify that the image is more than "documentary."

[Mike Tracy]

Yes. It qualifies as much IMO as a nature / wildlife image as the next.

I like the processing.

[Bill Jobes]

Yes.

If not nature and wildlife, how would you categorize it?

[Desmond Chan]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, folks !

It seems to me that to some people, a nature and wildlife photo is essentially a documentary photo, with the look of a "real" photo, if I may describe it that way. Not only that, it'd better be a color one, too. If it's a b&w one, they'd think you've applied your artistic decision to it even though fact isl photography started with b&w. I guess you've all probably seen photos in magazines of various kinds with photographs that have post-processing done to them to produce a certain kind of look. So I'm wondering, if the same - I'm not talking about removing or adding stuff - is done to a bird photo, for example, would people still accept it as a "nature and wildlife" photo?



Just wondering.

[Benjamin Kennedy]

Desmond, would you be willing to share the original image and the methods you used in postprocessing? I really like the image. And yes, I would describe it as a nature and wildlife photo.

[Richard Peters]

Yep, N&W for me. Very nice it is too!

[Don Lacy]

It is a photograph, a fine art photograph rather then a documentary photograph but still a photograph.

[Desmond Chan]

Desmond, would you be willing to share the original image and the methods you used in postprocessing?

This is a cropped shot. Here's the adjusted raw file converted to jpeg without anything done in Photoshop. I'm not sure how to get back to the "as shot" raw file and so I just uploaded the adjusted one here. I adjusted "Clarity", "Vibrance", a bit of "Darkness", then sharpening and small amount of noise reduction in ACR. "Exposure", "Recovery", "Fill light" and "Blacks' are as shot. The look of the one posted above mainly is the result of using Bleach Bypass filter (default setting) of Color Efex Pro. I didn't do a lot in Photoshop other than the usual color correction, some selective darkening and lastly the sharpening plus a bit of high-pass filter. I don't think I have even ran it through noise reduction other than that little of it I'd done in ACR. For web display it looks ok to me. If you don't have ColorEfex Pro, I guess you could try to get a similar result by adjusting/desaturating color and enhancing contrast to begin with and then some vignetting.

In case you're wondering, this is taken with D700 70-300 @ ISO3200.

[Benjamin Kennedy]

Thanks for all the info!