Female Willow Ptarmigan, near Mile 15 of Denali Highway.
Nikon D300s, 500mm f/4 AFS. 1/250 sec, f/4 ISO 200. Nearly full frame
Willow Ptarmigan
Female Willow Ptarmigan, near Mile 15 of Denali Highway.
Nikon D300s, 500mm f/4 AFS. 1/250 sec, f/4 ISO 200. Nearly full frame
Nice image, I like the rock perch and oof background. I'm also jealous I was at Denali in early oct. and didn't see any ptarmigan.
A pretty looking bird and pose. If you have the canvas available, shifting the bird to the right of the frame would improve the composition. I also find the bird a little on the soft side, and perhaps in need of a little more sharpening. Although, given the recent discussions on sharpness and monitors it would be good if someone else could chime in on this as well.
Ben-Originally Posted by Ben_Sadd
Thanks for the comments. I agree on the framing, unfortunately I didn't have any more canvas on the left side to move the bird to the right - this is very slightly cropped from the right side and the top. Given the bird's close proximity to the background, I elected to shoot wide open to blur BG as much as possible. Eye is tack sharp in original but breast feathers are, as you mention, a bit soft. Didn't want to oversharpen, and I'm a bit green on selective sharpening so if anyone has suggestions or advice I'm all ears (or eyes in this case!)
Nathan
Very nice image Nathan. TO add canvas is a little tricky, and it can take some time to blend carefully but can be done. CS5 also has a neat fill option called content aware fill. It works well, but in this instance it did a silly thing. See, I added canvas to the left, selected with a rectangular marquee and pressed Shift + F5 and use the content aware fill. this is the result. Funky, but a reasonable starting point. See next pane for about five minutes' worth of quick masking and some minor cloning and patching. WHen I finished I selected the bird and rock using a quick mask, then reversed the selection (CTRL + SHIFT + I) and applied a small gaussian blur to the BG, then reversed back to the bird and used smart sharpen for it and the rock. Not sure what you think. There are probably much better ways to do it, my preferred being in the camera itself. :cool:
And this is the final one.
Thanks for the demonstration! I haven't upgraded to CS5 yet - still on CS4 and I am the first to admit that my PS skills are not the best - never had any formal education in it but I think it's time! I am OK with sharpening and cloning but masking effectively has always been something of a mystery to me. Nice job on the edit - if I didn't know it I probably wouldn't have noticed. Only flaw I can see is the lower left corner rock seems too in-focus considering the shallow DOF - but easily fixed w/ some gaussian blur, eh?
Nathan
Akos' re-comp is good and it shows nicely what can be done. There are other methods to add canvas if you do not have CS5 with its' contents aware feature. Image>Canvas Size, then add canvas in the direction(s) and size you need, fill in the new area by cloning in some surrounding BG, then crop to taste (quick and dirty explanation, but hope you get the gist).
Head looks sharp from here too (the feet too) and I'm generally OK with DOF elsewhere when the face is in focus, but here I do wish a smaller aperture was selected for the chest feathers. I also wish the head wasn't tilted upwards, but still a fine image:)
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