Bald Eagle at the World Bird Santuary. She is a female and the biggest one they have. No control of the lighting but I actually liked how it turned out w/ one half of her face lit and the other side in shadows. She is actually panting b/c it was so damn hot that day. I have other close ups of some other Raptors but I'm going w/ this one as I have a thing for Bald Eagles. I think this should be in the six range but the dark side of her face could make people vote it lower, guess we will see!
Raw
Crop
Curves layer
Levels Laves
Layer to lighten the left eye w/ curves
Hue/Satuartion layer
Layer for Noise reduction
Layer for USM for contrast
Layer for burning some of the highlights on her feathers
Layer edge sharpening
Resize
Sharpen w/ Smart sharpen
save for web
Sweet, Top Ten! I know the eyes where OOF but I had to go for the happy medium and focus between the eyes and her beak, plus I had a low apature b/c of low lighting. Thanks for the comments and the votes and she is the same Bald Eagle that was my highest score from a couple months ago, she truly is an amazing animal.
Statistics
Place: 8 out of 285 Avg (all users): 6.5621 Avg (commenters): 7.6000 Avg (participants): 6.4211 Avg (non-participants): 6.7432 Views since voting: 2834 Views during voting: 294 Votes: 169 Comments: 23 Favorites: 5 (view)
From your comments: "I know the eyes where OOF but I had to go for the happy medium and focus between the eyes and her beak..."
I think this works so well preciseley because her eyes are in soft focus... it's like she's coming in to attack you in which case your focus would be on the beak and the eyes would fall into the background.
The image is from the perspective of the victim - if you'd focused on the eyes and let the beak blurr it would suggest more the 'self perspective' of the attacker (ie it would be concentrating on the victim through its eyes. And now I'm starting to ramble incoherently again - sorry :)
BTW did i mention this is a stunner. I hate to say it deserved a ribbon 'cos that's a bit disrespectful of the images that did... but it deserved a ribbon!
Since all my photo equipment was stolen and I am camera-less, I will spend time now voting...
Interest - 2
Theme Interp - 3
Technical Merit - 3
Personal Bias - 2
TOTAL - 10
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
