These birds live and breed in New Zealand. They over winter here during the colder months. This bird is a little early as it's still summer!
Taken yesterday afternoon at the local Marine Reserve whilst searching for Red-necked Stints coming into breeding plummage.
Canon 400D, 70-300mm, @300mm, ISO200, F5.6, 1/640sec. Tripod
PP: Cropped approx 15%, NR and blur on BG, Highlights and levels adjust. USM 100, 0.2, 0 (iirc). Double catchlight removed from eye.
Environmental factors: Very windy on the reef, lots of salt spray on the lens made it hard to get a sharp image at times. The sun was setting almost directly behind me. (approx 6pm)
Self Critique: I like the detail in the feathers. It's a bit hot in the throat, and I'm not sure why I didn't try to PP that out last night. The legs look a little blurry, not sure what to do about that. I purposefully waited for this guy to give a good HA!:D But the body is turned slightly away from me. If I moved to my left to get a more perpendicular angle, then I thought I may have gotten more of the bird in shade, but in hyndesight I should've given it a go to see what happened.
@Harold. I didn't even notice those triangles until you pointed them out. Now I can't stop noticing them!! ;) I'll do a repost tonight with them cloned out.
@ Jeff. Thanks for the heads up about the tripod threads. I haven't had a look at those ones yet.
Hi Mark - lots to like here - Harold and Jeff are on the ball.
Lots to like - IMHO Id crop some from the top to move the bird out of the middle of the frame.
Good show :)
Mark, I like the comp. The detail is fabulous. It's amazing that we can concentrate on the bird while processing and never see distractions. It happens to me all the time. That's why I love BPN. A little crop and voila, a great image. Congrats!
I can't do a repost at this point in time as my home computer is currently having kittens due to a failing HDD (thanks goodness for good back-up regimes!).
Hi Mark,
Nice pose and HA/eye contact. Did well with your equipment for sure. You must be itching to start using that L lens. Wives are cruel making you wait for your birthday in a few days! :p
I know that you wanted to know about quick masking techniques to remove those little distracting, triangular rocks intruding on the bottom, so I put this together quickly. One day, we could sit down with a laptop and I can show you one on one. It's pretty easy mate once you do it a few times. It becomes second nature. Though in this instance a small snip above those little light spots would also work and keep a nice compositional balance. Here is a quick run down on QMs. I hope you have photoshop though! :)
- Press Q to enter Quick Mask mode.
- On the top left of the image where the name is displayed and the text reads Double-banded Plover.jpeg RGB/8, it will change to the image name and then (quick mask/8) or so. (the number indicating bit depth)
- Though these adjustments are best done on a master file converted as 16-bit straight from RAW
- Press B for the brush tool
- Use [ to make brush size smaller, or ] to make brush size bigger. For your web sized image I chose 25 pixels as brush diameter in this instance, working on the jpeg you posted.
- I generally keep brush opacity and flow both at 100%.
- Make sure the active brush color is BLACK.
- Paint a small area a little bigger then the left hand side triangle at the bottom of the image.
- Don’t panic, the brush paints in RED, that tells you you are in QM mode
- If you mess up anywhere, just press X to change to the other active color on the palette, which should be WHITE (always when you are in QM mode) and you can carefully paint over the area you want to uncover and the RED paint you just brushed there will disappear.
- When ready to move on, press Q to exit Quick Mask mode again, and your title above the image will revert to Double-banded Plover.jpeg RGB/8.
- You will also see marching ants selection around the area you have painted red and the entire perimeter of the image telling you you have masked the small area out.
- Masking is actually covering an area you DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE, but in fact you actually want to MOVE that little RED painted (now marching ants selected) area over the little triangle on the left bottom to cover it up, so you need to INVERT the selection.
- Press CTRL+SHIFT+I to do that inversion.
- Press CTRL+J and it will place the small area you have now under selection onto a NEW LAYER
- Press V (move tool) and click on the now selected small area and move to the left to carefully cover the imperfection.
- Once covered, you need to merge the two layers. If you cannot see the layers palette on the bottom right side of your working window, press F7 or go to WINDOW>LAYERS and clicking it activates the palette and places a tick next to it in the drop-down menu.
- You should see a Background layer on the bottom and Layer 1 with the small rock selection on top.
- So to merge, click the Background layer so it is BLUE and hold down CTRL then click Layer 1 so it is also BLUE (actively selected), then press CTRL+E to merge layers.
- Now you can use the Patch tool or the Healing brush tool to blend edges where you covered up the triangle.
- Repeat the above QM steps for the little intruding triangular things on the RHS.
- Once you are happy, save file as per your normal process.
Awesome stuff Akos, thanks for the great tutorial. I'll have a go at this when I get home from work tomorrow. I've only got PSE, not sure if that works (ironically my work mac that I'm typing this on has CS4!)
The whole time I was with this bird I was thinking how good would this look with the 300mm! Only 3 more days to go until I get it!
Double-banded Plover (Charadrius bicinctus)
