The chrome water and ripples really do complement the grebe. The only thing "maybe" I'd like to see is a slight angling of the body to give it a little more dynamism.
Hi.. Allen,
Good work, Bird Reflection and Chrome water is looking nice. as per Chris said.
if you take full bird it would be more nice, but overall nice image. keep going.
The light is lovely here and what it does to the water is beautiful. I like the image a lot, Allen. I'm not sure about the composition though. Maybe try a different crop with the bird's head not in the center? I just tried a browser crop with the bird more on the upper right point of the ROT grid and that looked better in my opinion. But it is just an opinion of course...
I will play with it some more, but I initially felt the water reflections were a strong part of the composition, so I settled on what I posted here (knowing I didn't have the grebe's head or eye in a normal ROT position, though its eye is on the 1/3 horizontal).
Very nice image. Indeed those black&white waterbirds are exposure nightmares! Well said.
I personally don't find the reflection should be included, it is too distorted and I don't see an advantage in its inclusion. Although distortion of reflections sometimes achieves interesting results and an almost surreal version of the subject,(it helps if there lots of colors) I don't think that happened here. However, regardless of how well a reflection turns out, sometimes its inclusion is usefull in achieving balance in the image. I'm not sure that is the case here either. I also think in any case part of the reflection should be included, perhaps 1/3, since cropping at the bottom of the bird is a really bad idea.
There is another problem though. If you crop to lets say include half the reflection, you may have decreased the image size enough to effect image quality, which will be more severe if the image was cropped significantly already. Further cropping may be worse than keeping the reflection.
Of course instead of cropping decisions, framing decisions in camera are much better, and deciding not to include problematic reflections in the first place is something to consider out in the field. regards~Bill
Allen - good job on a bird that causes me endless problems. The colors and ripples in the water are very pretty. I would be tempted to exclude much of the reflection (either in-camera or in PP) as I don't feel it adds much. The face is quite bright in relation to the breast and front part of the wings, but I'm not sure how I would deal with that.
Allen, I like the pose and HA of this one but the lighting is really giving me pause. It's so harsh in places that it almost hurts my eyes. The darks feel too dark and the lights feel almost stark...probably due to that beam of light you were talking about.
I tried doing a shadow/highlight adjustment to bring the two closer to "normal" but it didn't help much - it mostly just wiped the colors out and left the image flat. In this case, I think waiting for the bird to be back in total shade and then exposing for that scenario might have yielded a better final image.
pied-billed grebe in late afternoon light
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