This image of a Pied Wheatear Oenanthe pleschanka is taken at Cape Kaliakra (NE Bulgaria), probably the most SW corner of the distribution range of this steppe species. All your comments are welcome.
350D, 300 f4 IS + 1.4x, ISO 200, 1/500, f9, tripod.
Hi Svetoslav With the bird looking left I would crop from the back side tighter The central placement is detracting from the image Would also take some from the bottom.
Would love to see the exposure compensation listed !!! Looks like you got a good exposure Whites look fine and there is some detail in the black feathers There is a halo around the head probably from S/H? Easy to remedy Just select the bird contract by one and apply Might also give it an extra usm pass !!! I like it interesting bg for the bird !!!
Dear Manos and Alfred, thanks for your comments! Forgot to mention that this is a full frame and now, after your remarks, I’m starting to think that the composition is far from perfect. Maybe some crop from the right and bottom part of the image would be of help.
Alfred, there is no exposure compensation, I’ve just used aperture priority and good positioning regarding the sun. Being b&w, these birds are extremely hard to photograph with proper exposure. In this case, direct sun light helps to have glow black feathers and good details in the white part of the plumage. Probably due to my poor English, I can’t fully understand your suggestion for halo remedy.
The background is actually the Black Sea.
Beautiful bird and setting. Too bad about the angle. I might decrease the contrast a few points. As for the halo, you can check out the tutorial wrote in the educational section how to select the subject in order to avoid these issues.
Very nice species but, being a black and white subject, very difficult to expose. This difficult increases under hard light condition like in your image. In such cases like this I made my exposure giving priority to the whites and, later, I try to recover as much information as posible from the blacks (the old rule of thumb “expose for the whites, develope for the blacks”). The exposure on the whites looks right here so you only have to work on the blacks to produce a nice result. Different ways to do that. Here I selected the black areas with a mask (using the magic wand tool and, if necessary, drawing the mask with the polygon tool), duplicate layer, and delete all the sky, rock and white plumage areas. Now I have a layer with the black areas of the plumage only and I can work on it while preserving the rest of the image. I adjust the blacks using the levels to increase contrast. I applied some additional sharpening on this new layer and combine both layers.
Regarding the composition, I agree with others and I suggest a vertical crop or a landscape crop but reducing the room at the right of the bird. I am working with a small jpg and the result is far from good but I think that gives to you an idea about the process. Working with a RAW file will produce, for sure, a much better result on this image so I encourage you to try it. Hope this helps and feel free to ask if you need more details. :)