Alan Kiecker, QPSA
January 2025 - Nicobar Pigeon
About the Image(s)
Discussion:
This photo was taken on a recent trip to the Minnesota Zoo. The zoo provides an excellent location to practice with your photography gear, and besides, the tropics building provides a nice warm environment when the thermometer is hovering around zero.
This photo gave me a great deal of trouble in the post-processing. As you can see there is stick on the camera side of the bird that I removed. I tried AI Remove in Lightroom Classic. This worked very well where the stick was over the feathers but a light colored “shadow” was left in the background. I tried this several times, both with AI Remove and the Healing tool but I had no luck removing this “shadow”. Several days later I started over and did this again. This time AI Remove worked wonderfully. I have no idea what was the problem the first time but it did a great job a few days later.
Technical:
Nikon Z8, Z 180-600mm lens @ 340mm, 1/125 sec @ f/6, ISO 9000. The image was processed in Lightroom Classic, noise removed in Topaz PhotoAI.
3 comments posted
Wow, talk about impact! The color and sharpness that you've captured here is breathtaking. I really appreciate the processing you've done on this with keeping the head and neck plumage nice and bright and vignetting the rest subtly out a bit.
It's easy to push colors like this too far too, but it doesn't feel overdone here - nice job.
Sounds like you did quite a bit in post on the sticks, and the only thing that I see that I'd suggest would be to get those few little ones out, just behind his head, as well. They're kinda bright (relatively speaking) and are a little distracting.
Awesome shot
Josh Posted: 01/22/2025 03:17:22