The Guardian
Taken at Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival in Titusville on Jan 27th (Thank you to The Raptor Project for this opportunity). Shot with Canon 450D, EF100-400 f/4.5 lens at 275mm, ISO 200, f/8, 1/800, full frame composition cropped in horizontal direction to 11x14 proportion, processed from raw file to retain detail in shadows and highlights. Wish I had taken a flash with me to help with the strong shadows.
Dawn, beautiful photo. You have captured excellent detail, I always appreciate the irises of the eyes. I think the flash would have helped quite a bit. The image appears to have a bit of noise in the shadows where I would guess you lightened the image to gain the detail. Still, very nice shot.
I really like the composition, very strong. Nice details through out.
I am pretty sure the 450 has an on board flash which is always an option.
Very good use of dof also.
Dave
hey Dawn, gorgeous picture - those feathers on his neck and chest are incredible. love the eyes too. Wish you could have been more to your right, but I hope to get a chance at a picture like this someday...
Dawn, I just had to give this a try.
I used Viveza to bring up the brightness and reduce the shadows of the darker white areas. I used a hue/saturation layer to pull back the blue cast from the whites. I then chose a white tone on top of his head with the eyedropper, grabbed a soft brush, and painted over the shadowed areas at 20% to bring them up even more.
I recropped taking a tiny bit off the right side and putting the top of the beak in the ROT's top right grid point.
Flash would have been easier but I think this turned out alright. Let me know if you have any questions.
Julie's repost looks great. An improvement to a lovely image to begin with.
WOW! You really put a lot of extra work in on this. It looks great. Thank you very much.Originally Posted by Julie Kenward
Dawn, it took longer to write down what I did than it probably took to do it.Once you know what works on one image in pp its easy to try the same things over again on others...and most times it yields a better image than what you thought you had. This one is lovely and I couldn't let the shadow ruin his majestic stare!
Dawn, really like the capture. Very nice composition. Would love to get an image like that.
Jules, wow you rock as well. Hope I get proficient with PS 5 someday. Have LR 3 down pretty well but began drilling down to learn PS5 in earnest today....my eyes are now crossed and my head hurts
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