Sun was high and harsh. This is my 1st photo of a N. Harrier. :)
Nikon D300
Nikon 300mm f/2.8 (non VR)
Nikon 1.7x TC
ISO 800, f/5.6, 1/2000
Hand held
EXIF intact, thanks for looking.
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Sun was high and harsh. This is my 1st photo of a N. Harrier. :)
Nikon D300
Nikon 300mm f/2.8 (non VR)
Nikon 1.7x TC
ISO 800, f/5.6, 1/2000
Hand held
EXIF intact, thanks for looking.
![]()
Nice, sharp shot and great pose! However to me it seems a touch dark and oversaturated....I would try lightening the shadow areas a bit particularly around the head and under the tail to bring out a little more detail.
Hi Mark. Great wing position and eye contact! Sharpness looks good too. But I agree with John that your saturation and contrast need to be throttled back significantly. Maybe you could repost the image after another attempt at processing.
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John and Doug, thank you for the comments and advice. Here's an attempt at a re-edit:
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Much better, Mark :)
Thank you John :)
The repost looks beautiful . But there are some spots which look hot . Love the wing position and the sharp eye .
Repost is better, still some hot spots though...But a good effort!
Thanks again for the C&C everyone. I have a question about the hot spots, what changes to settings or technique could have avoided them? The sun was high (10:30am), so should I have dialed in some exposure compensation for the dark bird? And, if so, wouldn't that have underexposed the rest of the bird? Just wondering as I'd like to get better at the exposure part of bird photography so I don't have so much work to do in PP.
To get an answer to that question, you'll need to show us the unprocessed original (preserve the crop if possible). In general with Harriers, the white patch is difficult to expose properly. I wouldn't jeopardize the entire exposure just to protect that one white patch, which doesn't have a lot of detail to it even when exposed correctly. There is no blanket answer on exposure compensation because it depends on how bright the BG is relative to the bird.
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Doug,
Thanks very much for that info. This is the 1st Harrier I've ever photo'd, so I wasn't even aware they had a white patch, haha! Unfortunately, I don't have the original photo. I shot this as a .jpg and just edited and saved it. Fortunately, for whatever reason, I did make a copy of the original and edited one of them darker than the other, which is why I was able to post 2 versions in this thread. I do normally shoot in RAW, but I'm pretty new to Nikon and was using that day as an experiment to see how well .jpg's would come out of the camera vs. the RAWs I had gotten a few days before. I actually like how the .jpg's came out, but will likely go back to RAW so I can controll PP just a little better. It's also a bit of a transition going from DPP to NX2, so I've got a PP learning curve to go through also.