This picture was taken while looking over a valley that was filled with clouds which provided the white background. I held the camera for this shot.
Anything
Anything, particularly cropping.
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
Canon 70D, Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L USM,
ISO 500,
F / 5.6,
1/800 second.
Processed in LR CC.
Instagram @nighthawkdavidb
Very cool and unique image David! Looks like he/she is about to do an acrobatic dive! Only change would be crop about a 1/4 or so of the bottom off. But I do see that as it stands, the extra space does give a better sense of the birds position in space.
Great pose and the white background works well with the shot. I think the space at the bottom works well with the pose-gives it a lot of room to dive into. Welcome to NPN, David.
Welcome to NPN, David. I like the comp. with quite a bit of empty space. This is a beautiful bird that I’m not familiar with.
I’d make a few processing suggestions. One is to resize the image to something between 1200-1800 pixels on the long end. You’ll wind up with better detail. Next, when shooting in overcast light like this, you generally need to add some contrast because your colors will get washed out. My preferred method is to set white and black points using a Curves adjustment layer in Photoshop. But you can do the same thing in Lightroom. I then select the bird and sharpen it using smart sharpen in Photoshop. Last, you have to be careful shooting red birds because you can blow the red channel very easily. I think you have some reds in this shot that are a little hot. In an attempt to remedy that, I added some cyan to the red channel in selective color in Photoshop. I took a shot at processing this, but you’d get much better results if you start from the RAW file, especially with the reds in the image. Let me know your thoughts:
Welcome to NPN and the Avian forum, David. An interesting image, David. I like the composition you chose-unusual, but it fits the situation very well. If anything, I’d think about adding a touch more on the left to decenter the bird horizontally. While it’s centered vertically, all the foliage being above it makes it still work for me. Detail in the Apapane looks good.
Again, welcome, and I look forward to seeing more of your work and seeing your comments on others images.
Welcome, and an amazing shot - due to the white BG and the birds pose, it gets some surreal quality (which is a positive thing in my mind). Suggestions as made by Lyle make sense. Love it ! Hans
