The Takeoff

[Ian Cassell]

Canon 7D
Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L
1/800 sec f/7.1 ISO 800 HH

Levels and sharpening in CS5
Some cleanup of debris from water surface

[William Malacarne]

Ian

I like the body position of the bird. Maybe take a little off the left side, but leave the nice water drops. Add a little more to the right for the bird to go into. I think the tips of the wing feathers may be a lil' hot.

I have been through Phoenix a few times but never spent any time there. Where id it you are getting pictures of all the water birds? I know they have lots of golf courses.....

Bill

[Ian Cassell]

Thanks, Bill. Well, the birds get confused by mirages of water and show up here in the desert ... (No, actually, there are a couple of really good spots in the Phoenix area for water birds. This is my favorite: http://www.riparianinstitute.org/birding.cfm . Golf course ponds also can be quite good, in fact.).


I checked my wings and didn't reach 255 on my original, but I agree it looks hot on this posting. I sort of liked the disturbed water behind him, but you might be right that I could lose some (and gain some in front). I'll try it this weekend and see how it looks.

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Ian, Bill is right on the money regarding the crop. Effectively moving the bird left in the frame will make a big difference for this one. You can easily use Content Aware Fill in CS5 to add some canvas on the right, and I would crop about halfway to the water drops on the left.

Really nice action captured and the water drops are wonderful. I'm really fond of dark backgrounds, so this one looks great to me.

Macs have a nifty little utility called "DigitalColor Meter" (don't know why they don't put a space between the first two words). It shows the 8-bit RGB values of anything you put your cursor over. According to that, the whites are over on the near wing which you can also tell by the lack of detail there. I would also like to mention that, just because nothing reaches 255 doesn't mean you won't have blown highlights. I like to keep the peak whites in my images at about 245 tops, as detail starts to deteriorate quickly after that.