This photo was taken during a 24 hr. Birding Contest: Montezuma Mucrace, southeast of Rochester, NY. Taken just before dusk with partly cloudy skies. Had to take from car window due to rules at Montezuma. Photo was cropped and adjusted in Aperture for exposure and vibrancy. I also removed some dust specs on sensor.
Camera: Sony A700
Lens: Sony 70-400mm
Exposure : 1/400 sec.
Aperture f/6.3
Focal Length 400 mm
ISO Speed 200 Exposure
05:00 PM Sept 11, 2010
Metering Mode Multi-segment
Light Source Daylight
No Flash
Color Space sRGB
Custom Focal Length In 35mm Format 600 mm
Dick, welcome to BPN! You've got a very nice pose and reflection here and I think the clean up was a good idea but I went a little further with it. I took out anything that dissected the reflection and anything that was OOF or up against the edge of the frame, leaving only the pieces that actually add to the interest of the composition. Remember that in cases like this, less is often more...
You also have a very unnatural blue shade of water here so I readjusted that in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) and then fine tuned it with a hue/saturation adjustment where I changed both the blues and the cyans to get it to be more of a natural blue.
Finally, blow your image up to 100% magnification and you'll see tiny imperfections in the water and you'll also see a sharpening halo around the bird and rock. I'd remove the sharpening and start over, going in this order:
Clean up what you can with the clone tool in the water and then run a round of Noise Reduction, masking out the bird so the feathers retain their detail. Then run a new round of sharpening and check it at 100% to make sure that halo is gone.
Dick, Some great suggestions already given. Another option would be to eliminate the reflection. I think lightening the image really helped. Nice pose and I like seeing these guys on a rock/mud bed. Welcome to BPN-Beautiful first post.
Thanks for all your suggestions and kind words. I will be going back to my original and trying some of your ideas. You made me feel very welcome and I appreciate that. I was a bit nervous about posting, but am now looking foward to posting more in the future.
Lovely work, Dick! Can you tell the difference of how it presents itself now that it's cleaned up and the color is corrected? Doesn't it have a whole other feel to it?
Lesser Yellow Legs Searching For Food
