Critique required please

Taking on board all the comments from the responses from my previous post here's an image straight from the camera


and here's a link to my Flickr site "birds" set, not brilliant but getting there in some cases :-)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/45689323@N00/sets/72157600209817222/

Not really large enough to comment critically Steve, but all appears well with this shot, and a bit of contrast/saturation work should bring it to life nicely

Had a look on your link, and you have some lovely shots!

Just noticed that you started out with a Zenith Steve ...........so did i, and i 'think' Mike did also . Ahhhh, that old Helios 58mm {brings a tear to my eye }

Alan

I would try shooting in better light if you are after this type of shot I think the light was against you here, and also maybe get a little closer to the subject to get more detail in the bird. I have looked through your gallery and you have some great shots.

Cheers
Brian

Bit small to comment on really and at this size whites look hot on the neck and it looks quite noisy. Be good to see a larger 720 image

Some very nice images on your flickr pages Steve

I take it this is a full frame image - no crop, seeing as you say it's straight off the camera?

Still far too small to make any judgment really - upload images 720pixels on the long side on this forum Steve.

But from what I can see the comp looks good - the swan could do with being up in the frame a tad but that's about all, and Alan's suggestions would just help make this into a really nice image I think

Steve

As others have said a touch small to critically assess, just looks a bit washed out and could do with a saturation boost and increase in contrast to make it 'zing' a bit more

Alan - yup my first camera was a 'Zenit B global' to be precise, weston euro lightmeter and Jupitor 11 135mm F2.8 lens plus a 3 element Telemore 2x converter - real cutting edge and racy stuff for a 12 year old at the time! (all my mates had twin reflex Russian Lubitel cameras) Agfa 64 film was all I could scrounge off my dad as well - iso100 was a dream in those days, and people now complain about the noise handling of DSLRs at iso 3200

If I remember correctly it is slightly cropped to remove a stray duck, but no post processing on colours, contrast etc, it was dullish day, slightly hazy too

so suggestions received and I'll see what I can do :-)

Hi Steve

I think that this links to your earlier post pretty well actually. Like you say you know your cameras, but this is where the joy (or tedium depending on your point of view) of Photoshop comes into play. I suspect that with a bit of playing in PhotoShop you'd get this looking how you want pretty quickly. For example, I just set the white point and black point in curves, and this is how your shot looks (hope you don't mind!).



Mark

I dont mind at all, thats exactly the sort of advice I'm after (along with everything else), I reckon that I need to hook up with someone who knows what they are doing with post processing, I knew my way around a darkroom years ago, I just need a few pointers

the sharpening thing intrigues me as well, is it just me that thinks that some things are ruined by over sharpening ?

Yeah images are ruined by oversharpening, but as shooting RAW gives you no sharpening, you judge it on experience and what it looks like on your monitor. My monitor's crap so I may well over sharpen at times, but posting images for critique will highlight things like that and you get to know your limits more. If things look oversharpened on here, mention it as a question, and you'll no doubt find that others will mention it too. If no one mentions it, it's either fine, or they know the poster is huge and will beat them

I sometimes prepare an image for web, save it, bring it up on screen, and then do some searches for similar images on here and do a comparison. can highlight casts, sharpening, sometimes lack of and all sorts. Good luck. Look forward to seeing your 720px images