I like your bird photo, Michael, and how you captured it in a natural setting. The heron is centered in the frame, the bird's feathers have detail, his eye is sharp, and the narrow aperture has the whole bird in focus.

The area I thought needed some attention was the overall brightness. I also see the white feathering under the beak and eye is over exposed and may not be recoverable.

I am not proficient in Lightroom, but in my edits, I lowered the white point with the Tone Curve to 233 (instead of using global sliders); I felt the highlights were high because of the bright sun. I added a vignette -10, so it wasn't seen but felt to control the brightness further. Then I applied a brush mask to the blue sky areas and tried to lower the saturation (not sure it did a good enough job), which seemed too strong. The second mask bumped up the saturation on the bill, and in the third mask, I lowered the highlights on the bird by selecting Subject; it mainly chose the head area and not all of the body, but this was the area I wanted.

I am curious what you think and if you can even tell the difference. I tried to make the edits discreet because it is a nature photo. I do not have my rules out but I am not sure if you can make this many edits for nature competition; just so you know.

Let me know what you think.

LuAnn   Posted: 05/06/2022 14:19:14

LuAnn, thank you for your comments and suggested edit. I do think your edit made an incremental improvement. I especially like how you brought down the exposure / luminance on the tree trunk and branches. It does make the bird stand out better. In my description I didn't discuss my editing, but it was done entirely in LR where I did select subject and increased the exposure and vibrance. I added a vignette of sorts in the upper left and lower right using the radial gradient tool. According to PSA competition rules, vignettes in wildlife photos are not permitted. Nor is one allowed to remove distractions.   Posted: 05/06/2022 14:31:36

Michael,

I like how you have a fairly tight frame to exphasize the heron, which pops out at you. The details are nice and sharp. The only thing I might add is perhaps make the background tree branches a little more out-of-focus in post, as they are just a bit busy. Maybe a mask with gausian blur.   Posted: 05/09/2022 14:32:14

Michael, I really like the sharpness of the heron. You have captured the detail and texture of the feathers, and the eye. The branches frame the subject and I like the yellow blossoms complimenting the heron's eye and beak. Very nice image.   Posted: 05/10/2022 15:56:59

I like how close you've gotten to the heron, especially with nesting birds that's not always possible. The sharpness on the heron's eye and feathers is especially striking. All the branches can be a bit distracting, so sometimes a heron perched on the edge of a branch with the sky as background is preferable.   Posted: 05/11/2022 10:28:50

Hi Michael,
Your image is very interesting to me! For some reasons, I have never seen the blue heron in its nest. I always see the pictures of this bird near the water or waiting to catch fish on the rocks. Your close-up image is very sharp with all the details of its eye and feathers.
I'd suggest you to crop tighter on the right as a square format to diminish the busy background. Your image could win big in nature competition because it's different than the norm.   Posted: 05/17/2022 20:49:18

Thanks Kieu-Hahn. Thanks for your comments and the crop suggestion. I appreciate your attempt at "removing" the cluttered background by the square crop, but I fear it simply traded one issue for another - namely that the bird looks boxed in. I think the real problem is two-fold: 1). The natural setting where these birds nest is always going to be cluttered… and 2) I should have shot the image using several different f-stops and chosen the one that best gave a balance between sharp bird and soft background. I'm still trying to dial in my settings for my long lens and it looks like I need some more practice!   Posted: 05/17/2022 22:20:38