Water Skiing Tundra Swans

[Craig Wallace]

Taken at Ridgefield NWR Washington. This is part of a series of landing swans.
D2xs, 80-400mmvr at 400mm, iso 400, f/5.6, 1/640, +.33ev, matrix mettering, aperature priority, hand held. Comments and suggestions welcome. Thanks for looking.

[William Malacarne]

Craig

Nice action shot. I would maybe take a little off the bottom to drop the birds away from center of photo. It would have be a little better if you had separation between the birds. Of course when shooting nature we don't always get what we want.......:(

Bill

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Craig,

Greetings. A number of different crops might work depending on if this is intended as part of a series or as a single shot... a pano aspect ratio might be interesting. I like the color and mood of this image. The water has a number of visible processing artifacts (hard edge circular clones... I count 8).

Cheers,

-Michael-

[John Chardine]

Great symmetry in the birds. This image has potential. A much tighter crop would bring out the birds. Hope the IQ can withstand it. I see the cloning anomalies in the water. Best to use the softest brush possible when you do this, so as to avoid the hard edges seen here. Also good to report anything like that in the image write-up.

[Dave Leroy]

I like the nice symmetry of the two birds landing side by side.

I also think a pan crop work work well to get more attention of the landing pair.

Dave

[Julie Kenward]

Craig, I saw those two beautiful birds and then was immediately distracted by the swans in the BG. No matter how hard I tried to keep my eye on the two main birds, my eyes kept flitting up to the ones above them.

I cloned out the other birds (which aren't really adding anything to the image since you can barely tell what they are.) I then did a surface blur on the BG to make it all kind of melt into itself, leaving the horizontal lines of colors and textures but not anything that was powerful enough to distract us from the incoming pair. I then darkened it a bit and did a pano crop to bring the bird pair into the center of attention. It's a whole other take on the image and might not be your vision but thought you might like to see another take on this lovely image:

[Craig Wallace]

Thanks Julie, The changes you made really improved the image. I asked for suggestions and received some very good ones. My photoshop skills are lacking, but improving.
Thanks to all.
Craig