Cindy Marple
December 2025 - Bateleur Eagles
About the Image(s)
About: Photographed on an early morning game drive in a private reserve in NE South Africa. We initially stopped the vehicle where the eagles had a tree in the background. Then we drove around a bend in the road and found that we had a blue sky background so stopped and took more photos. The pair were engaged with mutual preening, part of their pair bonding. Nikon Z8, 400mm, 1/1000 f/8 ISO560. Processing: cropped, increased overall contrast and recovered some of the dark detail with the Shadows tool.
4 comments posted
Cindy, you have captured this pair in a nice pose and with their orange heads, they ooze character.
There is no original, so I can't tell what PP work has been done other than your narrative. On looking at it for the first time, it took me a few seconds to understand the shape of the left bird and I would thus lift the shadows slightly. I would try what doing this for both birds looks like, but selectively for the neck of the left bird only may achieve a better result, so long as it looks natural. I think the quirkiness of the pair will come over better. Just a suggestion.
The branch emerging from the bottom left corner is perfect, but I wonder why you have left the birds in the centre. I would see what cropping from the right and top looks like.
Posted: 12/13/2025 11:23:21
There is no original, so I can't tell what PP work has been done other than your narrative. On looking at it for the first time, it took me a few seconds to understand the shape of the left bird and I would thus lift the shadows slightly. I would try what doing this for both birds looks like, but selectively for the neck of the left bird only may achieve a better result, so long as it looks natural. I think the quirkiness of the pair will come over better. Just a suggestion.
The branch emerging from the bottom left corner is perfect, but I wonder why you have left the birds in the centre. I would see what cropping from the right and top looks like.
Posted: 12/13/2025 11:23:21
Hi Adrian, thanks for your comments. I've played with the blacks a few different ways trying to extract the detail while not losing the "richness" on the series of images of this pair. Increasing shadows more didn't have a good result so I tried increasing the black point. It's a subtle difference, not sure it'll show up here. This is something I'm sure I'll keep fiddling with!
As for the centering, I did it intentionally because of the interaction and poses of the birds. There's no sense of movement in their activity, it's static and relatively symmetrical. Centering emphasizes that. I did try the crop but it felt very unbalanced to me with too much empty sky on the left. Posted: 12/13/2025 21:58:13
As for the centering, I did it intentionally because of the interaction and poses of the birds. There's no sense of movement in their activity, it's static and relatively symmetrical. Centering emphasizes that. I did try the crop but it felt very unbalanced to me with too much empty sky on the left. Posted: 12/13/2025 21:58:13
Here's the original image. Posted: 12/13/2025 21:48:41
I think what's happened here is that, while taking the shot, the birds should have been exposed such that the shadows were opened up for their detail. Then you wouldn't have had to play around so much with the shadows tool. This meant that the sky would have brightened considerably, but in editing you could have selected out the birds and darkened the sky. It's difficult to get natural looking details from very dark exposures. Posted: 12/15/2025 22:37:11