Morning Flight

A pair of trumpeters doing their thing in the early morning light.

D2X, Sigma 120-300 w/2x converter, f8.0, 1/350 sec.

C/C welcome.

Dave Hatfield

Hi Dave, nice capture of the swans in flight, I find the background to be a bit distracting, but there is not a lot that can be done about it. Nice light on the swans and detail in the feathers. Nicely done and thanks for sharing!

David

Thanks, David! I agree -- the trees always look a little "busy" when they are included in this type shot. I tried a number of different altererations via PS but then it begins to look artificial. I struggle with including the trees to give a little more depth to the shot and putting up with the distraction, or eliminating the trees and taking only open sky shots, but that seems to make the shot appear two-dimensional and flat. No perfect solution, I guess, but I still love seeing these huge, beautiful birds in the air.

I'll post more later.

Thanks again and have a great day!

Dave H.

Nice capture for sure David.

C/C welcome- I agree that the trees are distracting. Two things I think you can try. One is when shooting, get your shutter speed down to 1/25 up to about 1/200th and use a panning technique.{relitive to speed of subject and distance from subject} You may have to rip some shots off to get one you like. Second is to add the motion blurr in PS. Would it be ok for me to give it a shot on the small version and post the results?

Tim

Thanks, Tim! Probably the motion blur in PS is going to be the best solution in this situation. I find that if I drop the shutter speed much below the 1/350th mark where it is in this shot, I begin to lose way too much definition in the wings unless I happen to catch them in a glide, rather than in full flight as these are. Feel free to have a go at adding the blur and posting the results. I tried it on an earlier version but, like I said to David, I felt the results looked a bit too artificial. I'd love to see if someone can effectively do it then let me in in the technique!

Dave H.

Your right, I didn't consider for the flapping wings. I did a quick edit, you could spend an hour getting the wing edges perfect.

dupe layer>magnetic laso select both birds>invert selection>added motion blur(more than it needed)>reselcted the birds and used healing brush to take the bird blur out>clone stamp to correct some edges>adjusted layer Opacity to suit

I tried to do it with a mask but couldn't seem to get it to work around the birds very well. It could still use some work on the edges.
I dont know how to add a picture into a reply so here is where it is.

http://timferrell.com/065_2845-webB.jpg

Very nice, Tim! I had no luck with masks either and didn't try just a simple selection of the birds to rule them out of the equation when applying the motion blur. I'll have to do some more experimentation to see what I can come up with.

Thanks for the suggestion!
Dave H.

Interesting discussion guys. Have you tried processing the file twice, once for optimizing the swans and once for blurring the background. Overlay the two images (with the razor sharp bird layer on top) mask the top layer and paint in the blurred b/g layer (or vice versa). Another way to go.

BTW, like the image itself (and the reworked version).

I like the rework version also, the swans tend to stand out from the background a little better. Wayne has a good suggestion also, not a technique I've tried though.

David

Wayne, your suggestion is actually the first method I tried that ended up looking too artificial for my tastes. I may go back a revisit this method, though, because I still believe that masking holds the best potential for blurring the background adequately. Probably the reason that it looked artificial to me is that there is a great deal of fine detail around the swans that required a lot of intricate work that, frankly, I just didn't give the time necessary to do the job appropriately. Some day when I have the patience, I will probably go back and give this method another attempt. When I do I'll post the results and see if you all like the corrected version better. I agree that Tim's quick rework demonstrates the potential that lies in this image so I'm now inspired to give it another go.

That's what this forum is all about! Thanks, folks!

Dave H.

Hey, I did have one more idea.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=8456&A=details&Q=&sku=234440&is=USA&addedTroughType=categoryNavigation

Just a thought, because this is such a great flight shot of the Swans... A technique I've used is to do a gaussian blur on the background and a selective curves layer to darken the bg. These 2 things can usually reduce the distraction and recede the bg along with giving the birds more distinction against the bg. What do you think?