Thanks for the comments everyone.
PaulBoy - yes, the shows were excellent and very entertaining.
Mike - you are very lucky to have seen these creatures in the wild. I've not been to a place like this before so was in awe of these birds. The flying demonstrations really showed their power and grace.
Puli - in answer to your question about the Eagle Eyes photograph, I generally have the same workflow with all my photographs but depending on the subject the extent to which I do things will vary. A summary is:
- I shoot everything in RAW.
- I use Canon DPP to browse the RAW files, selecting those which are my favourite and have a good chance at turning out well (I physically move these to a separate directory)
- I go through the selected files, change the white balance if necessary, set the picture style to faithful, leave colour tone at 0, usually increase saturation up a couple of steps, set sharpness to 0 then adjust the exposure if necessary (By eye and using the histogram).
- Then I transfer to photoshop.
- If necessary I use Noise Ninja to reduce noise whilst trying to maintain sharpness (no sharpening is done yet though).
- At this point I may crop the image if necessary. I genearlly keep a 3:2 to match the uncropped aspect ratio, but I have done the occasional square crop too.
- I may clone / heal any blemishes (e.g. sensor dirt etc).
- I look at levels and curves to see if I would like to change anything. Generally I do as the faithful picture style usually looks pretty flat.
- I may dodge and burn areas of the image (E.g. the pupils and catchlights).
- Depending upon the image I may selectively lift the curves in any dark portions (In this example, this is what I did for the Eagle Eyes).
- The dodging and curves adjustments sometimes pushes the colour saturation too far so, again for the eagle eyes, I selectively reduced the saturation of the eyes as they looked too red even though they were bloodshot.
- When I'm happy with the colour balance, saturation, brightness and contrast of the image I will finally apply some USM as no in camera sharpening had been done. Again, this may be selectively done - e.g. around the eyes.
- Finally, I change to 8-bit mode and save as level 12 JPG before uploading to flickr.
That looks like a lot now I've gone through it all but I actually think that the major task in the whole workflow is going through all the images and deciding which ones to leave and which ones to PP. Most images are then processed in a few minutes although some difficult ones I can spend much longer on! For now I enjoy the PP as much as making the photographs so I'm happy to spend time in front of my computer.
Gizmo - I don't know about having done this a few times before! I just made extensive use of the continuous drive on my camera! The eagle was really pleased with itself having landed on the glove successfully and let out a loud and triumphant call to much applause from the audience!
Holo - thanks for the comments. It means a lot coming from the master of bird photography!
Before I go, a final couple from the day:
21. Returning Harris Hawk 22. Harris Hawk
Cheers.
- I've been there too its a great place to see birds of prey & they put on great shows!
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