A very interesting idea. I wish that the birds were either running parallel to the sensor or slighty towards it, not away. Composition wise, I would have liked even more of a pano crop with a little more space to the left. If you can, I would try to lighten the birds and slightly reduce the brightness of the foamy water.
I agree with Ben's critique. For me, the overly exposed foam is too harsh for me to care about the birds much - I instantly wanted to shield my eyes. It also wonder if more blur would have given you an even better image - here it feels like you just missed the shutter speed. Leaving the birds trailing behind themselves would really have taken it up another notch IMO.
Michael, how did you post-process this? Did you take it to a monochome/duotone or is this pretty much as it was out of camera? I'd love to know what you did in processing this image.
Thanks much for the comments. That's what I wanted to know. I was trying for something like a blurred silhouette... well, I'll have to rethink the shot...
Jules, pretty much out-of-camera, er, out-of-raw conversion, anyway. I mostly use custom curves for raw conversion (this is like pp curves, but applied in the conversion process - Nikon calls them picture controls & has an editor for them in Capture NX2). For this image I used one that I made for mid-tone contrast, essentially an s-curve. Other than that, just a minor LAB curves adjustment for saturation, and general cleanup.
Hi Michael. I have seen a scene like this, with sanderlings or other peeps scurrying from an incoming wave many times, and it is pretty funny, and the basic idea of the image is a good one. However, the problems of the image, as you realize and others have pointed out, are hard to overcome. Not close to a silhouette, which would show the birds much darker, not enough of a blur to show it was intentional and not an error, over-exposure that didn't create high-key, but somewhere in between, all show that some techniques have to be much more pronounced, so they appear to be deliberate, and half measures are rarely successful. regards~Bill
Something a little different
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