Pair of Snowy Egrets

[Ronald Zigler]

Canon 60D, 300mm f4 + 1.4x, 1/1600, f4, ISO 800 HH. The photo was taken at 8:13 AM. I imagine I was not early enough to avoid loosing detail.

[Richard Stern]

Hi,

Beautiful colors, sharpness and pose of the 2 birds. Whites are good, perhaps a little sharpening on the head of the left bird would be good. It would be nice to add some canvas on the left, to give more room for the birds to look into.

Richard

[Ronald Zigler]

Thanks Richard. Unfortunately, there is no more room on the left. This image was only cropped a bit on the bottom. This is not a problem I have had very often. I noticed a group of snowey egrets moving toward me where I was waiting in my parked car. Eventually, they waded not far from me.

[Richard Stern]

Hi Ronald,

I hope you don't mind, but I tried a little tweaking on your image - namely extending canvas to the left, touching up the extended area with cloning from the right, and applying a little sharpening to the head of the left bird. Actually, this exercise is just as much for my own education, to see what can be done with extending canvas. What do you think?

Richard

[Ronald Zigler]

Wow Richard! Well done. Thanks, it does look better and your cloning job is superb (at least as far as I can tell). I have an older version of Photoshop Elements (5.0), but I wonder if I could learn to do that myself.

[Richard Stern]

Hi,

I got the instructions for extending canvas from a thread on BPN a couple of years ago. You should be able to find it by searching the site. It's really quite quick and easy. I did it in PSE9, but I'm sure the same tools - crop, rectangular marquee, and image transform, are available in 5.

Richard

Richard

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Ron, the composition would work for me if there were only the one bird on the right. I don't think the second egret adds to the image at all, especially being out of focus. The whites are blown in some areas, I think it was more from overexposure than the quality of the light. The sunlight looks pretty bright and direct to me, and with an all-white bird like this I would be shooting ISO 400, f/7.1@1/3200 or something similar like f/8@1/2500. The techs that you posted seem odd with the high ISO in direct sun, but then not pushing the shutter speed up. A lower shooting angle would be preferable. Keep them coming!