Sony A850~Sony 70-400G@400mm~ISO 3200~1/1600 sec~F5.6~manual exposure~HH~overcast~1-20-2011~Brazos Bend State Park,Texas~CS5~Redfield Fractalius
After catching several fish, which I witnessed a bit too far away for my 400mm:(, this female climbs back up to her perch. Comments and critique welcomed. regards~Bill
Bill, the pose and the perch are great! What an awesome capture this is! I'm wondering about what you did (or didn't do) to the BG...is it "grainy/textured" on purpose? I like it...I'm just wondering how you got it that way.
Thanks Julie. About the background; I didn't do anything to it, other than what I did to the whole image. The usual duplicate layer, apply fractalius to that layer, reduce its opacity to 50%, increase saturation of base layer. Often at this point I use a history brush to paint back the eyes to those of the original. Backgrounds, especially with high ISO images as this most certainly is, can display digital noise, which fractalius will exagerate. When in ACR (with high ISO) I apply as little NR (luminance) as possible, only being concerned with the subject, and not the background. Backgrounds can be dealt with by the standard background blurring in the base image before applying fractalius, or erase the background in the layer the fractalius has been applied to. However, the numerous water droplets in this image make either technique much too time consuming, so you have the grainy baackground as you see it. I convieniently like the graphic quality of the grain. regards~Bill
I like the pose and the water drops. I also think the tail feathers add a lot to the composition. The slight softness gives the image a nice look. I'm not terribly fond of the grain but it almost looks like note card paper. Nicely done.
Sometimes when I have noise in my BGs I actually prefer to keep it in, as it can add some texture and additional feel to the image. Actually, with your image, I think it would be cool to try to make it even more grainy throughout, almost having a pointillistic look to it.
Thanks so much for the explanation, Bill. Now that I hear what you do it makes sense. It just looked so much like a textured BG and I didn't remember you really using those before so it kind of threw me. I like the idea of erasing the fract BG...I don't think I've tried that before.
Anhinga
regards~Bill
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