Avocet washing

[Chris J]

Liked the way in whch the "shape" of the water thrown up by the wings follows their curves.
However, a black and white bird in action may have stretched me a bit too far -



50D + EF100-400L.

I use DPP rather than Photoshop, finding the procedures and terminology of the latter rather bewildering. I know that some of you are experts in using such packages - could you make something better of this image than I have done? If anyone has a bit of time to play the file as it came out of the camera (JPEG) is at - http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3385/...72200f93_o.jpg

Cheers, Chris.

[oldcanon]

Re: Avocet washing

Chris, just for fun I had a play with this in PSP12 (I quite like using it now and then to remind myself how simple things can be) Here's the result, which I think has brought out a bit more detail. Mainly playing with brightness, contrast and levels + a fair bit of sharpening. See what you think but I think that you could get a not bad image with a bit more work

[Muscat]

Re: Avocet washing

Chris, also for fun I spent 5 minutes playing in Lightroom, mainly modified brightness and contrast but used the adjustment brush to add some clarity and additional sharpening. Another variation for consideration

[Stan]

Re: Avocet washing

Heres my take, edited in CS3
Applied shadows/highlights, levels layer on a selection of the eye, tweaked colour balence using colour balence layer, cropped and selective usm on the bird

Stan

[briansquibb]

Re: Avocet washing

It occurs to me that the main object is the avocet - so my take is:

- get rid of muddy water by turning the photo into monochrome
- white vignette to spotlight the bird

[Chris J]

Re: Avocet washing

Cor!!
Thanks a lot for your efforts with this - I'm amazed at the improvement! You all seem to have found extra sharpness, extra contrast, and even displayed the eye...
Full of envy about how you do this - I thought there was something better in there than I had achieved.
I like bsquibb's way of isolating the bird - it emphasises the shape of the bird, its wings and the shape of the water that was thrown up as it washed.
Cheers, Chris.

[hughbie]

Re: Avocet washing

Chris,
Just a thought, but I see that you used ISO 100, that gave you a 1/400 shutter speed at f7.1.

You may well know all this, so apologies if this is taken the wrong way. Rather than worrying too much abouth PS etc, crank up the ISO a bit next time you get an opportunity. Starting at 200 would give a faster shutter, ISO 400 even better - would reduce the blur on the avocet & keep more detail. You can still tweak in DPP but you'd have more to start with.