Pelican Group

Gallery: AvianPosted June 15, 2018297 views3 comments

We see pelicans only when they migrate through. So was a pleasure to see a whole pond full of them, and difficult to isolate them. Watched them fish for one afternoon. Had to sneak up on them via cow pasture and hide behind grass tufts. Not easy on a bright afternoon. Great shots of them fishing, and flying/landing on water. Fun afternoon.
Nikon D800, 600 mm, f16, 1/200 second, iso 100

Comments

3 comments

Comment posted by Dennis Plank on June 15, 2018 at 5:15 PM

A nice grouping, Jan. Pelicans are always cool. The whites look like they're blown out causing you to lose detail in the bodies. With that dark water background you probably need to dial in at least -2/3 stop of compensation and possibly twice that. You said you were doing flight shots as well, so probably the best solution is to adjust your exposure to just avoid blowing out the whites in the sun and shoot in the manual exposure mode. That way the background doesn't throw things off.

Registered on January 28, 2008, 1767 Posts, 23192 Comments

Comment posted by Keith Bauer on June 15, 2018 at 5:33 PM

Jan: Yes, nice to get a group of Pelicans like this. Your exposure and processing are causing some issues. The whites in the Pelicans are blown with no detail. Don't know if you can recover that detail in RAW processing. Image also looks to be over saturated by a good bit. Those blues don't look realistic.

Registered on November 20, 2003, 458 Posts, 4836 Comments

Comment posted by Jan Bostelman on June 17, 2018 at 10:41 PM

this was the original. This was a case of I'm just working with Lightroom and hit the punch button. Now after spending many days in the processing getting better at it. I had gotten used to CS2, and now feel like relearning stuff again. So yes I made the mistake of using a preset in Lightroom without understanding it's effect. Learning much more.

Registered on April 9, 2018, 24 Posts, 34 Comments