Featherdale Egret (B&W)

[firsty]

one from the get together at Featherdale wildlife park today

it's B&W as I need a B&W fauna image for this months competition at my local camera club.... Is this worth entering and do I need to edit it further or should I keep looking ??

[gstark]

Keith,

I'd like to see some richer blacks in this. It's very good, and very close, but I don't think the scale of greys is quite there.

[firsty]

thanks for that Gary, I was thinking along the same lines but I'm not sure how to add them without making the egret to dark and muddy
do I just drop the exposure on parts of the image , if so what parts... the legs and foreground ???

[gstark]

You would ask the difficult questions, wouldn't you?

Ok ... let's see if we can work this bird's eye, shall we? Can you perhaps bring that up, and see if you can make the pupil richer? Difficult for me to tell because it's so small.

The legs .... work with the texture, I suspect. I'm sort of wanting to bring the blacks up through more contrast, but this is already pretty high in terms of the contrast levels applied. Maybe bring the general brightness down a nudge, and then see where you can go?

What PP did you apply to bring this back to monochrome?

[firsty]

I've been using Lightroom to edit this
I desaturate all the colours separately in the mixer so that I can play with the luminance of each of the colours individually this also lets you still play with colour temp and vibrance to add extra options (much better than using the std B&W setting)
the problem with the photo is the lack of different colours in the original, who would have thought a bird would match it's colouring to it's surroundings

had a further play with your suggestions



the question now is I have another photo I like more but it is not a B&W so I may loose the lead in th B&W competition
so do I keep the Egret or use this Lizard



this is the other Photo I'm entering (seen here before but this is a re-edit)



thanks for the help

[biggerry]

That shot with the elk? (is that what they are?) is great, great timing not to mention nice and sharp all over the animals!

or use this Lizard

go the lizard - this one stands out straight away, for me anyway!

[ewm3]

Do the lizard; sharp, 'punchy' and it's looking at the audience. The bird is 'just standing there' and lack s something.

Eric in Adelaide