Taken on a typical cloudy, rainy pacific Nw day.
D2xs, 80-400vr at 320mm, iso 320 f/7.1 1/200 +.67, matrix metering, wb cloudy, beanbag in truck window. vr turned off. ACR, cs4, shadow/highlight, levels, curves, hue/saturation, selective color. only sharping in ACR. horizonal crop to vertical.
Comments and suggestions needed and welcome. Thanks for looking.
Craig.
I really like the pose and water drops on the duck
If it were mine I would lose some fram on the right and top and add some on the left.
Some cleanup on the water above the ducks head wouls help also.
Best wishes for the New Year.
Peter
Hi Craig. Disclaimer; this is only my opinion! I would hope for more feather detail, and although you didn't mention it, I would guess that the image was considerably underexposed, lightened, and noise reduction used to fix it. I've been wrong before, but that was it "looks" like to me. I see you used .67 EC, and that was probably insufficient. I'd guess, and this is only a guess: +1.5-2.0 EC.
Although some swear by matrix metering, since I am only interested in getting proper exposure for the subject, I would use center-weighted metering (or whatever Canon's name for it is).
Using shadow/highlight, levels, curves, hue/saturation, and selective color seems like quite a bit of adjusting, which makes me wonder why.
Also the shutter-speed may have been too low as well, and even though the camera was steady, slight subject movement, which is hard to notice in the viewfinder, can cause a lack of sharpness.
ISO 320 seems pretty low for the lighting conditions, and I think you could have used quite a bit more shutter-speed, as well as more light hitting the sensor. I'm not sure about your camera, but I would shoot around ISO 1000 and push the exposure (far right an the histogram with not too much clipping), then reduce exposure in ACR, and recover any clipped highlights.
regards~Bill
Last edited by WIlliam Maroldo; 12-29-2010 at 07:51 PM.
Hi, Craig. I like the second image better; I agree with Ian and Dave about the crop; I'd see how it looks with just a little more off the right and perhaps the top; I like the square framing with this one.
With a subject with that many dark tones, and that background, I think I might have gone for somewhere near + 1.5 EC with matrix metering; like Bill above, I'd rather have a darker subject like that a bit over-exposed than a bit under. I think I might have bumped the ISO to 800 or so and tried to get a shutter speed closer to 1/500 if possible (that said, I haven't shot with the D2x, and don't know how much additional noise you might have had at ISO 800 - 1000).
Otherwise, the pose is wonderful, and focus looks spot on, to my eye.
Looks like you got some great advice, Craig. I like the WB in the first post better; the repost makes the water look a bit unnatural. You could always select the bird first, warm him up and leave the water as is in the OP.
Female Ring-necked duck
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