Lauchlan Toal Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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ben egbert wrote:
These guys are hard to shoot. I would like a tighter crop and a bit more contrast. Maybe leave just a bit of land for context.
Yeah, I was torn between cutting off too much land versus having the bird too far away. I opted for a more environmental shot, but a closer crop would definitely help highlight the cormorant. Thanks for your input!
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Shasoc wrote:
As you know any picture is as good as the light you have. Not the best situation to shoot wildlife and you never can be close enough to get your shot.
Anyway, there are many different ways to increase the contrast in a picture, curves being one. A cool way to do that is to use Unsharp Mask with a low amount (~20%) and high radius (~50) Threshold 0. I did a mix of both.
Color were enhanced using Curves. These are natural color, colors that are actually extent inside your image. Looked like there was a bit of magenta cast in the original.
No much you can do whith this image. Here is my attempt.
Socrate...Show more →
Thanks Shasoc, I appreciate the advice and example! I'm currently using PSE11, but I'll keep these settings in mind for when I switch to CC later this year. Did you identify the colour cast by fully saturating the image, fixing the cast, then desaturating it?
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Oregon Gal wrote:
I like the square crop but would be curious if adding more room on the right may be beneficial. My inclination would be to add slightly more contrast and sharpening on the Cormorant only. I do like the inclusion of the shoreline and overall placement of the bird within the shoreline.
Thanks, I tried a 2x3 and 5x7 ratio with more space, but I found that the photo lost it's visual balance a bit. At least, in my opinion. The rocks just became a bit too dominant. I'll play around with spot adjustments on the cormorant, cheers!
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andrewsk wrote:
Ill echo Shasoc. The light is poor and evokes no mood for me. His crop is good but there is not much more that can be done here I think.
Next time, perhaps a longer lens. Leave out the background unless it is visually appealing and adds to the story.
If you post a bigger version perhaps we could crop in more?
The top of the wings are blurred. Is that intentional to show movement?
I'm hoping to have a 120-300 with tcs for next year, which should get me much better reach and IQ for cropping. But yeah, the lighting was pretty contrastless due to the heavy mist. There's not a whole lot more cropping I can do since at ISO 640 there's a lot of lost detail, and the 55-300 is pretty soft... Though I might be able to scrape out a bit more. As for the wings, I was just shooting relatively slow seals and then caught this guy out of the corner of my eye and shot without having time to adjust settings. I'm not sure that I could have afforded to up the shutterspeed though, as opening the aperture ruins sharpness/AF, and the ISO's already pretty high. With a faster lens / better body that would definitely have been ideal though. I appreciate your advice!
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