Duck

[gunn parker]

Hi
I have recently bought a 512meg card and so I can now take a lot more pics in raw, so I went down to the river and took this photo, I opened it in ps2 and pretty much left it at the camera setting, this one was changed to the flash setting.
Opinions very welcome
Andrew

[avkomp]

welcome to the dslr tradition of posting a duck photo.

This is a wood duck.

As for critique, the light is quite harsh. In general the best light for this sort of thing is early morning, late arvo.

also, getting down to eye level can make for more pleasing animal and small children shots.

Steve

[gunn parker]

Great, thank you for your input.
Andrew

[Colcam]

Nice duck shot here, but I would suggest that you get back into the RAW software and maybe look at it in Daylight or possibly even Shade mode, darken your exposure some, up the brightness a smidge and slide the contrast some to try to darken the overall feel while still keeping the highlights crisp. Maybe even some saturation too?
As Steve mentioned, your light is very hard as is typical at this time of day, but possibly some work in the raw converter and again in Photoshop will reap rewards. I had a five minute hit on it mainly with levels and Hue & Sat., on a non-calibrated monitor, but with more time and a bit of fun, it should look great.

[gunn parker]

Thanks for that, I have others from today and now I know of more ways to correct my work while having fun.
thanks

[LostDingo]

welcome to the dslr tradition of posting a duck photo.

This is a wood duck.

As for critique, the light is quite harsh. In general the best light for this sort of thing is early morning, late arvo.

also, getting down to eye level can make for more pleasing animal and small children shots.

Steve

That's not a Wood Duck He's alive

Sorry...nice image

[gunn parker]

I think this might be better, I adjusted the colours a bit more and croped it again to get rid of the stick at the bottom.

[Colcam]

[quote="gunn parker"]I think this might be better, I adjusted the colours a bit more and croped it again to get rid of the stick at the bottom.

The colour looks a bit too dark on my monitor now, although maybe if you selected the duck and adjusted your levels in Photoshop to give it a bit more contrast and llighten the tone on the head a little (which I had to on my attempt) to give his "eye contact" a bit of lift. The stick on the grass could have been cloned/healed out, but the crop should have taken some off the right hand edge as well, I feel, to get the bird out of dead centre. Very few of my images remain uncropped. My opinion anyway.

There are many happy and productive hours to be spent around the old duck pond to be sure.