Hello all. I've been reading here for a while and just joined. I wanted to try a post so here's my first effort. This was taken the 18th of December, 2009 in Grand Ledge, Michigan. I was about two hours from home and 10 minutes early for an appointment. Drove through town and noticed a beautiful little park filled with ducks. It was kind of a grey, cool December evening but the greens from all the Mallards provided a stark contrast to the grey background of the river. ISO was high as I was also trying to catch the other fly by's in low light handheld.
I believe I followed image sizing rules so I am curious as to what you think. I had some issues with the attachment and trying to get my typing below the picture. Perhaps I have done something incorrect.
BTW the talent here if amazing and I appreciate the opportunity to learn.
Welcome to BPN and very nice first post. Here are few thoughts.
Composition: A very well composed image. Little too tight for my taste and I would give some space around the subject.
Subject: Very very well captured. Great eye contact and head angle. Very well done.
Techs: I see from your setting you used ISO 2000. Image is very clean . You made a very sharp image at 1/60sec.
Post processing: needs a little bit of levels adjustment. Take a look at my rework.
This image needs a good amount of contrast boost and levels adjustment.
I agree with the image being a little tight. I had a similiar version I did with more contrast but was worried about the red in the feet being somewhat over the top. The greens in the neck/head do jump out and you kept the darker feel in the tail section. (Mine kept getting too green.)
I worry about how much post work is too much. I want to try and keep the integrity of the original while bringing out the best in processing. I need to learn what is the best balance of this for my tastes and everyone elses.
Thanks for the quick feedback and I'll try and take this image a little further.
Hi Jeff - a big warm welcome to the BPN family - nice first post, lots to like here.
Sis's repost certainly improves your base image, you have a good HA and eye contact and sharp details throughout.
Shutter speed a little low for the focal length but see you were at 2000ISO already? so it must have been quite dark.
In regards to post processing - these days you can pretty much do whatever you want - AS long as you disclose what you have done.
looking forward to more :)
Hi Jeffrey,
I like your duck. You do have a good head angle and good eye contact. Sid's repost make the little guy come alive. The first thing that pops into my mind was the tightness in frame, an easy fix in post processing. Once again, a big welcome to the BPN family...:) Looking forward to your next one...:cool:
Thanks for the input. I went back and reworked the original raw file. Got rid of the crop from the right side of the image but had to do some work to remove the tail of a female mallard that caused me to crop in the first place. I feel that this version is too much but decided to repost for your thoughts.
I developed the raw image in Lightroom bringing out the blues and greens much more, did some contrast and brightening adjustments, sharpening and detail...saved as tiff and moved to Photoshop. Removed extra duck, filtered colors slightly, smart sharpened and saved. Reopened in Lightroom and fine tuned. Reopened in Photoshop, sized and another round of sharpening before saving for web.
The only thing I could still do is add some real estate to the left side of picture so that it is not so tight.
I am not sure if this was the right place to repost the adjusted image but I valued your input.
December Duck
