Superb detail in the eagle and the pilings, Daniel. I like the head turn-obviously fixed on something besides the photographer. The blue of the water feels a bit unreal to me-just too intense for the northwest. Two compositional items, one of which is an easy fix-I think just a tad more room on the right would be more comfortable because the tail feels crowded to me.
The other item is the top of the eagle’s head coinciding with the land sky boundary. I don’t know what your position was, but if there was a way you could have moved just a bit higher your could have gotten the head below that boundary. For my taste, that would have made for a more effective image.
This is still a fine image-just a few tweaks that might make it even better.
PS. I don’t see any real reason to have lowered the shutter speed. You had adequate depth of field and your iso was fine for any modern camera. Unless you’re trying for intentional blur in a motion shot, there’s no real reason to reduce the shutter speed when you have lots of light.
Thanks for the feedback. I didn’t adjust the color of the water but maybe LRC did that when I edged up the exposure slider. The sun came out between rain storms and perhaps that was the true color of the water? I agree about the land-sky boundary. I was shooting from the boat ramp. The background line is the Dungeness Spit. I’ll think about how to get higher. The eagles are nesting now and often land on that piling. I will be going back often over the next few days/weeks.
Hi Dan. My thoughts were similar to Dennis’s. Great setting with the pilings, which I feel adds a lot to the image, and the detail in the eagle is excellent. Good depth of field. I took the liberty of playing around with the image in Photoshop. I cloned out some of the background (which many may not like), lightened the water, added a bit of canvas on the right, and dodged the foot to bring up some of the color.
Thanks to all - Peter, Allen, Mervin and Dennis. I am a real novice with Photoshop so don’t really understand what Allen did to make the changes. but they did improve the photo. That piling is a favorite spot for the local eagles so i will try to find a different place to stand.
It could be as simple as doing the opposite of what you were doing for this shot - if you were standing, sit down, if you were down, stand up. Sometimes just the simplest thing yields the best results. And this eagle perch is worth the effort. What an intense bird and I like all the detail you have in it.
Allen can probably give you a better explanation of what he did, but it isn’t all that hard. I’ve done the same thing when a horizon wasn’t right. Masking the bird and removing the background with Content-aware-fill or clone stamping takes practice, but it’s worth it.
Those are decent. I purchased his course as well and it helped a lot. If you’re feeling comfortable, and think you’ll use Photoshop a lot in future, I recommend looking next at the TK8 Plug In for Photoshop. It makes using it a bit easier in some ways since it simplifies complex actions with buttons. Most famously it makes luminosity masking really, really easy and that’s been the most important step in my photo editing. Steepish learning curve, but then again, so has Photoshop. For me it was just deciding which one I wanted to climb.
Agreed, @Dennis_Plank - I purchased the panel with Sean’s video guide and then later bought Sean’s Luminosity Master Class sessions. He’s a terrific teacher and photographer.
