Taken while being bored (and cold) sitting at a hole in the ice waiting for a male Goosander to get into position. Several swans where circling around and the image is almost full frame. Not quite sure whether it is an OK image or just plain boring.
Nikon D300 + 500 mm, ISO 400, 1/80 sec, f/8, exp bias + 1 1/3, fill flash.
Processing is mainly a bit of background blurring.
C&C would be welcomed
What I like about the picture is the texture of the white. I find it very difficult to get good white feather detail at the same time as good darks. In this case the blacks on the beak still retain detail, so I say from an exposure perspective it is quite good. Also the focus is very nice.
The light conditions are probably what made it possible for you to get such a nice exposure so the background is a bit dull. One think you might consider is adding a bit of saturation to the background. No so much that it overpowers the subject, but adds just a bit of color.
The other thing is the ever present head angle consideration. This is not bad, but a degree or so more toward the camera in my view might make the image a bit more engaging.
I do not know if you have any room to go with sharpening, you do not want to go over the top, but I would try a touch more around the head.
I like this, detail in the eye is impressive and the whites are nice.
I also suggest adding a liitle color to the BG to make bird stand out.
Pity it didnt turn towards you, would have been a killer.
Svante, I took one look at how clear and expressive the eye was and I had a feeling the white were a bit blown. Why? Because eyes never look that good without being either overexposed or corrected in PS!
The whites did have a small spike on the right end of the histogram so that means they were slightly overcooked. I did one of the only tricks there is for bringing back the whites and that is to use a linear burn blend mode on the image. I duplicated the layer (Ctrl + J) and then changed the blend mode to linear burn and reducted the opacity to 90%. I then added a layer mask (the white circle in a gray square at the bottom of the adjustments panel). With the mask selected, I grabbed a soft brush with black set to the FG color in the tools palette and lowered the opacity of the brush to 75% and painted the linear burn off the beak and eye.
The linear burn added depth to the sky and brought back the nuances of the whites. (It also calmed down the hot yellow just a bit as well.) See what you think and let me know if you have any questions!
Thanks Jules, I always appreciate your explanations !!!!
Interesting, my TIF image that I have worked on only have around ten hot pixels on the top of the head (the eye was fixed in Photoshop). After I exported it in jpg, sRGB etc the whole bill is blown mainly in the red channel and a lot more of the white head is also blown. (Your image actually looks a lot more like mine before exporting it if I may say so myself :o)
I have switched to exporting from Lightroom with conversion to sRGB and jpg, scaling to 1024 pixels and medium sharpening (earlier did it in Photoshop but felt there was a lot more manual work). Is that a bad way of doing the change or is it usual to get jpg'ing problems when you are close to the limits ?
Last edited by Svante Larsson; 01-15-2011 at 03:22 PM.
Whooper Swan
Posting Permissions
