My first Dippers!

Took a trip upto Gigrin and the Elan Valley a few weeks back. Spent most mornings exploring the local rivers before afternoon of kites. While out looking for Otters I noticed a pair of Dippers nest building not far from Rhayader so went back the following morning for a spot of photography. The light was crazy changing between overcast and bright dappled light through the trees. I have tried my best to process this within the confines of my poor photoship skills. Let me know what you think.

Nikon D300 + 200-400 + 1.7x convertor
iso 200
f6.7 1/30 sec and -0.67 compensation
bag hide and using tripod and bean bag to stabilise (slow shutter, should have knocked up iso )

Well I'm jealous just that you saw them.

From a processing point of view this is an image of two halves - I think you have to ask yourself whether the overbright out of focus LHS is really giving you anything. So I'd crop this to a portrait format losing everything to the LHS that's bright (about 265 pixels or so at this size). I'd then use the shadow/highlights tool to lighten just the dipper probably using a mask to just apply the adjustment to the bird. And since we're playing I might be tempted to add a grey graduated across the lower RH corner just to tone down the brightness there too. I think you would end up with a shot that you'd be even more pleased with.

Good first shots. I would loose the left hand bird and do a vertical crop on the right one.
You may be able to get a little detail in the shadows on the bird too.
JohnR

definately a difficult image to expose and process, i think you've done well in the situation, really like the repetition with the two birds

Nice shot of the right hand bird, lose the left as said above, good try.

well I am going to put the cat amongst the pigeons and disagree with most of you. I really like having the oof dipper LHS. I feel it adds a nice balance to the image. Loosing the oof dipper makes it just a standard dipper portrait which has been done before. Cropping the oof bird out and the majority of the LHS for me means a failed image, but hey I have about 100-150 more images to process so got plenty of keepers

In which case maybe try putting a graduated grey layer in coming from the LHS using the multiply blend mode and reduce the opacity until you are happy with the balance of brighter area vs dark. I'd then play with the shadow/highlight tool to get some more detail in the shadow areas. It's not the composition I don't like, just the lighting, and I think you should be able to get more out of this file if you want to. Hopefully you've got a similar view when the light was less contrasty to play with.

Hi Ben,

I also like the inclusion of the oof bird, when I opened up the post my first thought was 'thats different'. I think you did well in some tricky lighting conditions. May be worth a little tinker as suggested by Duncan to see if you can get any more out of it. Looking forward to more.

Cheers,

Lewis.

Ben I really like the Dipper on the right but I'm afraid the OOF one does nothing for the image IMHO.

Looks a fine image as is to me - people seem too eager to crop the hell out of images nowadays so that they conform to an ideal.
Nice enviro shot

Simon

To be honest Ben it is the harsh light which spoils it for me, composition works well.

Phil Newman

The composition works very well, some careful processing to tone down the left side, i.e. a neutral grad filter on the left half; or two images processed from the same RAW file, one processed for the left side tones and one for the right, carefully merged in layers would make this a stunner!