Mike Cohen
About the Image(s)
While I was reviewing my pictures in camera, they were shown magnified. I often check the focus that way. This image would have been a toss had I not seen it cropped in the camera. I’m lucky to have the opportunity to shoot a lot of nest building anhinga and as a result try to be picky with what I keep. I favor dark images, and I liked the attention on the eye and twig produced by the exposure. There was a lot of work I had to do to process the image. The cropped image was very noisy. And I used Topaz denoise AI to do the best I could with that. There was something, probably bird droppings, on the trailing part of the plant, a blue color cast on the bird’s back, and large bright blobs along the bottom. I used AI to help me replace the problematic areas. For the blue color cast I used a luminosity mask output to a saturation layer and knocked down the blue, then another saturation layer to knock it down farther. I had to mask the effect out everywhere except where I wanted it on the bird’s back. Finally, I did some dodging and burning. I dodged the edges of the downward facing wing and some areas of the twig, as well as the light feathers behind the bird’s head. I burned some of the background and an area just behind the head that looked cloudy to me. Finally, I added a bit of a vignette. Sony a1m2, 200-600 @ 379mm, 1/2500 second, f/6.3, ISO 4000.