Gadwalls Away

A pair of Gadwall Ducks taking off from the tide flats at the Old Valdez Townsite.

Sony a6500, FE200600G @ 600 mm (900 mm w/crop factor), ISO-250, f/6.3, 1/4000, hand held.

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Nice action captured. I like that the female is giving good eye contact. Light looks pretty good. But there seem to be some image quality issues. Detail in the ducks could be better, and the background has quite a bit of detail and noise. It looks like this was perhaps a distant shot of the ducks? Any chance of getting closer?

Hi Gary, great to get such sharpness on both ducks and they are well exposed. I find the background to be somewhat distracting rather than complimentary unlike the other similar shots you have posted. Still, a fine image the water droplets from the ducks and nice catchlight in each eye.

I like the concept of this image very much. Nice pair of ducks, both with nice wing positions. All great. The background for some reason is really pulling me away as others noted.

Here’s a version with a really quick fix.

Opened the image
Did a Select Subject in PS - That did a perfect job of grabbing the two ducks
Put that selection on it’s own layer on top
Duplicated the background layer
Did a Blur / Surface blur with a Radius of 15 and a Threshold of 29.

Here’s the result.

Nice job, keith. It made a big difference. The problem is the lens bokeh. Sony’s 200-600 zoom lens is very sharp with excellent resolution and has a very reasonable price but the bokeh is not so good at high zoom levels. It tends to create swirls and double images. I’ll just have to take the extra time to work the backgrounds on images with lots of objects. Your demonstration shows that the effort is worth the extra time. Thank you for the re-work!

Yes, I like what Keith did. In the original, the ducks both had really good texture and noise reduction whereas the background appeared quite noisy and distracting. Excellent behavior and action.