How and Why I Did It - Post-processing a Great Blue Heron picture

Today's blog is another blog on how and why I did it. First, I always shoot in raw and raw files need post-processing. Second, photography is a art and the final picture is how I visualize it in my mind's eye. Also, I hope these tips are useful for you and I hope you let me know your thoughts.

In my last blog about the Mandarin Duck, there also was a picture of a Great Blue Heron. As I looked further at that picture, it did not please me. So I did some further post-processing on it to hopefully make the picture better. At least so to me.

Location scenario: this picture was taken across Leverett Pond, part of the Emerald Necklace in Boston, at an island where this Great Blue Heron landed. Equipment was a Nikon D 7100, I Nikon 500 mm f/4 with a 1.4 converter, on a Gitzo tripod with a Mongoose Gimbal Head. Settings were 1/200 seconds at f/5/.6, ISO 400.

Here is the original photograph prior to post-processing.

Here is the first iteration of post-processing prior to taking the picture into Topaz Clarity and returning the photo to which I posted in the previous blog.

Original Cropped

Initial Settings

 After doing my initial settings, opening Topaz Clarity and adjusting the picture I return the picture to Lightroom and did a few further adjustments by utilizing the highlights, shadows and blacks sliders plus adding a slight vignetting to the picture. This is the picture that I posted yesterday.

 Now 24 hours later, I re-looked at the photo and felt that something was missing. I I just read a blog by my friend Denise Ippolito http://deniseippolito.com/blog/2013/11/28/the-shadow-nos/ on how to adjust the blue in the shadows. here is her how to do it

“I took my image into Photoshop and duplicated the layer (Ctrl or Cmd J) I went to IMAGE> ADJUSTMENTS> HUE & SATURATION, when the dialogue box opened I selected the Blue channel from the drop down then I went to 100% saturation in the blue- this will give me a good idea if there is a lot of blue in the shadows. If there is a lot of blue in the shadows simply slide the saturation slider all the way to 20%- this will take away the blue in the shadow but it will also take blues away from other areas within your image. To fix that just add an inverse layer mask by hitting the 'alt' or ' option· key at the same time you click on the layer mask icon. Next, simply paint the shadow area with a soft brush set to white at between 80-100% opacity.”After I followed her technique and brought the image back into Lightroom from Photoshop, I still felt that the picture was missing something and decided to utilize the radio filter in Lightroom to fix the background.

My Settings in the Radial Filter

The Final Result

Nickerson Beach Nassau County Park, Long Island, New York

Black Skimmer in Flight

I just returned from a weekend workshop at Nickerson Beach Park, located on Long Island.  First, I want to thank Denise Ippolito for running a great event and all her help and teaching.  We arrived at the beach between 5:35 AM to 5:45 AM and were out photographing before the sun rose and continued photographing until we lost the great light and then went to brunch at a great bagel place and had a lecture.  The first day, we returned back to the beach at 4 PM, and photographed until sunset.  Because we arrived in the afternoon before 6 PM, we had to pay an entrance fee to the beach.  It was worth it.

Nickerson Beach is a 120-acre Park that borders the Atlantic Ocean.    Depending on the month, there is a large variety of nesting birds, including Black Skimmers, American Oystercatchers, Piping Plovers, Least and Common Terns and a variety of gulls.

American Oystercatcher

Nickerson Beach has been part of the Nassau County Park systems since 1967 and the beach is approximately a half mile-long.  There are restrooms, and a food concession area.  If you like photographing birds, this is a great area to visit.

Further blogs will detail the interactions that I had with the different species of birds.

Bird Behavior, Bathing and Photography

The fun of photographing birds at of the animals is capturing the unusual.  Partly it can be luck, but also it is understanding the behavior of the animal that you are observing and trying to photograph.  I have a large number of images of ducks and gulls swimming and walking, so lately I've been observing them in order to capture of the behavior.  One of the events that I have observed is that when birds bathing and preening, they will usually rise and spread their wings, which gives you different action and behavioral photographs.  The idea is to have patience observe and be prepared for that event.  The other day when I was down at Jenney Pond in Plymouth, Massachusetts, both Mallards and Ring-billed Gulls were preening and bathing, which led to some interesting photographs. 
In order to help people with their photography, I am going to provide some technical information on what equipment I used and what settings and further information on post processing.
I utilized a Nikon D7000, with a Sigma 300 mm f 2 .8 lens along with a Sigma 1.4 tele-converter.  Because the Nikon D7000 has a 1.5 crop sensor, my equivalent focal length was 630 mm.  I used a monopod - Monostat-RS, which I love because of its large swivel toe stabilizer that prevents involuntary movements and yet permits smooth motion, and the horizontal for photographing moving objects.

For this photograph, I wanted a partial blur.  So I had set my f-stop to f 13 and my shutter speed was 1/250 sec.  For all my photographs, I had my ISO set at 400.
For this series of pictures my f-stop was f 7 .1 and the shutter speed ranged between 1/1001/250th of a sec. For more infoation about creating blurs check out A GUIDE TO PLEASING BLURS by Arthur Morris and Denise Ippolito at http://deniseippolito.com/prints/


Mallards:

Male Mallard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ring-bill Gulls   

Post processing was done in Lightroom and with NIK software, Viveza 2 and Color Efex Pro 4, which allowed me to control the contrast, saturation and the detail in the pictures.

As I continue to look at the pictures, what I identified as mallards, except for the male Mallard.  O am thinking that the pictures are more of a Black Duck-Mallard hybrid, because of the bill color and that there is a touch of green on the ducks head