I went to Les Aigles de Leman today. It is near Evian in France (which you may know is the place where the Evian bottled water comes from) and it has lots of birds of prey. Some of them were sitting on perches outside their huts without any intervening glass or wire so I took the opportunity to take a few close up shots in between the showers. I think I have the names right but if not and if you can tell from just head shots please let me know.
All taken with 1 DsMk2 and 300mm 2.8.
C&C welcome.Thanks for looking.
Martin
1 Bald Eagle
2 African Fish Eagle
3 African Fish Eagle preening
Aug 01, 2008 at 03:32 PM
anthony whitmo Offline • • • • • • Upload & Sell: Off
Wow that's a great variety of Eagles Martin.
Kind of hot on the whites of number 1 and number 4 Condor.
It doesn't look blown to the point of losing all of the detail though.
You might try a 50 % Grey layer and tone down the whites OR
Use the Shadow / Highlight on a new layer and bring down the hi lites a tad
The place you went sounds very interesting and your fortunate to have such a great variety of eagles close by.
Four Eagles in one place - what an opportunity, Martin! Your chance came along and you nailed them. It would be nice to view their entire body too. If you have such shots, maybe you can post them.
GENE
Aug 01, 2008 at 06:55 PM
anthony whitmo Offline • • • • • • Upload & Sell: Off
Here is the information from Socrate. It was in a post here on the Nature and Wildlife forum. I commented on that post to bump it back to the front page.
But here it is removed from that post and pasted here.
This is Shasoc (Socrate's) technique
I only do the sharpening as my last adjustment (no sharpening in RAW) and I use the Smart Sharpening tool. Amount 100 - Radius 0.2 - Remove: lens blur - More accurate: Unchecked. I usually do one, to three passes with that setting as needed. After every pass I use the fade command (go to edit/fade sharpening/luminosity mode) and I use the Luminosity mode to apply the sharpening only to luminosity. This has the same effect as converting to Lab mode and sharpening the Luminosity channel only, but it is faster and less destructive . If needed I reduce the opacity a bit also. I hardly use the advanced mode of the Smart sharpening.
Those are my settings for the web sharpening. For the normal sharpening I use higher values for the radius, but I hardly exceed 1.0. Uncheck/check the "Preview" check box to have a better view of how much sharpening you've applied. When you think your sharpening looks good reduce the opacity of about 20% because we all have the tendency to oversharpen a bit.
It is also important to get the image's overall tonality right to begin with. This will bring more detail to be sharpened.
Hope that helps guys
Anthony
Oh and here is the post with the information in it
anthony whitmo wrote:
Chad says I'm a DH
My wife says "Oh your something alright"
Does any of that count??
No Problem Martin >> glad to help any way I can
Ant
Every bit counts Anthony Chad just has his very own way of expresing it. I am sure you know exactly what your wife means!
BTW I went back to the site of Les Aigles du Leman and they have a video there where they went hangliding with a Bald Eagle.The eagle even landed on the hanglider in flight and was filmed from that and another hanglider. I am sure it must be the same Bald Eagle that I took a shot of and that we have been doing the PP on.
You can see the video at http://www.lesaiglesduleman.fr/v2/Accueil.html. Its a long video in french but you can push the slider up to about halfway to see the hangliding and the eagle.
Martin
Marten I can see these birds are wearing Jesses on there legs so I was wondering if they are captive and have some kind of perment injury to keep them as residend birds or are they healthy enought to go back to the wild?
Lou
I love the head shots Martin... but I do have to admit that the Anthony treatment helped the whites in some of these... all in all a very interesting series.
Good shots, Martin! Though I agree with Ant about the white details in that one BE pic; Ant did a good job in fixing things up . Looks like a great place to see raptors Up Close and Personal...
Hi Martin, eagle head shots, very interesting #3 is a neat comp, must have been cool to see in the viewfinder! I think the rework that Anthony did looks very good on your image too.
lbuscher wrote:
Marten I can see these birds are wearing Jesses on there legs so I was wondering if they are captive and have some kind of perment injury to keep them as residend birds or are they healthy enought to go back to the wild?
Lou
Hi Lou,
Well they are held in captivity so I guess they are captive all right. But from what I can see these birds are healthy and well looked after. Even the quality of the Jesses speak for that. In addition this enterprise seems to be a participative one as distinct from a zoo where the animals are on display and there is little interaction with them. Here the birds are handled by trained falconeers and I would suspect that this contributes to their well being. In an earlier reply I mentioned that the website had a video where the Bald Eagle went flying free with its handlers flying alongside in a hanglider. One could argue if they were really free when they are trained to come to lures but overall they seem to be much much better than animals in a zoo. They sure would be healthy enough to go back to the wild but they probably would have to be trained to fend for themselves to do so.
Thanks for the question which opens up a really interesting topic.
Martin
Mr Zoom wrote:
Beautiful work, Martin. Would prefer to catch them in the wild but will never pass up an opportunity to like this either
Ken
Thanks Ken for your kind comment. You are right of course and I would much have preferred to photo these in the wild but not any other opportunities here.
Martin
Terry D wrote:
I love the head shots Martin... but I do have to admit that the Anthony treatment helped the whites in some of these... all in all a very interesting series.
Terry
trailhiker wrote:
Good shots, Martin! Though I agree with Ant about the white details in that one BE pic; Ant did a good job in fixing things up . Looks like a great place to see raptors Up Close and Personal...
Best Wishes,
Steve
Karl Witt wrote:
Hi Martin, eagle head shots, very interesting #3 is a neat comp, must have been cool to see in the viewfinder! I think the rework that Anthony did looks very good on your image too.
Karl
Thanks Terry, Steve and Karl.
Yes Anthony did a good job in fixing it up all right and he has retained the color better in the eye and the beak than in the version I did. Will have to pay more attention to the exposure when shooting white subjects. I might go back and try again as there were a couple of other eagles I did not have the time to photo.
Martin
