Long-Billed Curlew

[Melissa Groo]

Taken from the water with Shadle a couple months ago at Alafia Banks, Tampa Bay, FL. Late afternoon light.
Post-proc: Lightened/cloned a couple dark spots in the upper BG. Applied contrast and USM, and some sharpening with Smart Sharpen. Ran NR on BG. No crop at all.

Canon 7D
500mm 1.4x
ISO 400
1/1600 sec at f/8.0
Gitzo 3530LS Full Wimberley

Looking forward to any comments and critiques. Thanks so much for looking.

[Mikko Viljamaa]

You have all the needed three angles right in this one. On my screen the bird looks a tad soft. But it might be just me.

Nicely done.


Mikko

[arash_hazeghi]

Lovely pose and low angle Melissa, you certainly got the best angle and a nice BG too! I have to agree with Mikko that it looks a bit soft which is surprising because you say there was no crop...it looks as if some noise reduction was applied to the feathers...maybe worth reprocessing
cheers

[Mike Milicia]

Great pose and perfect placement in the frame left to right for a full frame image!
I'd prefer to see the bird a bit higher in the frame to allow room for the "virtual feet".

Details do seem a bit lacking but it doesn't look like soft focus to me.
Maybe due to shadow recovery or NR on the bird?

[Melissa Groo]

THanks for looking and for your comments, Mike, Arash and Mikko. Arash, your comment made me go back and check, to discover that yes, it was quite a crop. I had cropped the original in LR some time ago, which was a mistake, should have done that on a virtual copy. Anyway it was about a 60% crop. Have rerun it and made less of a crop with more room for the curlew to walk into. Tried more careful sharpening work. Do you all think it looks improved? (Sometimes I get so afraid of oversharpening that I err on the side of undersharpening--and then the pendulum swings again, maybe too far! oy :2)
Mike there is a bit more room below in original but had rerun this by the time you wrote your comment, will try that on next iteration!

[Mike Milicia]

Sharpening better on repost, maybe tetering toward oversharpened.
Again, left to right placement looks good but maybe too much negative space at the top and, as you indicated, still a bit tight at the bottom.

Something about the bird still looks less than ideal to me, maybe a bit on the bright side and looks like red channel might be blown which is easy to do on these birds in anything approaching warm light.

[John Guastella]

The repost definitely looks better WRT sharpness, but I agree that there is too much room at the top. No one has mentioned that there are two catchlights -- better to remove the second one. I like the BG except for the darker band running across the top.

I've photographed these birds a lot, and for some reason the resulting image can give the impression of softness even if the focus is spot on. Something about their plumage, perhaps?

John

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Melissa, your repost works much better with regards to sharpening and detail. Good low perspective, and I like the colour of the water. I would also take about half off the top, and run a touch more NR on the BG.

[Melissa Groo]

Thanks so much to all, all excellent points. Will take some off the top for sure. John, I'm intrigued by your thought that the impression of softness may be partially due to their plumage. I wonder about that too, particularly on the head. But simply don't have enough experience to say so for sure. But I also think there may be something I don't have quite right in the workflow process.... oh and the double catchlight detail occurred to me when I was first looking at the pic but then promptly forgotten, thanks for reminding me, I'll take that out.