A Hawk

[AlanE]

1


P1050945 by Nokinrocks, on Flickr

2


P1050943 by Nokinrocks, on Flickr

3


P1050939 by Nokinrocks, on Flickr

4


P1050925 by Nokinrocks, on Flickr

 

[SCraig]

They would have been gorgeous in color but that's really all I have to offer, sorry.

 

[AlanE]

They would have been gorgeous in color but that's really all I have to offer, sorry.

A couple in color


P1050960 by Nokinrocks, on Flickr


P1050945aa by Nokinrocks, on Flickr

 

[SCraig]

Much better, thank you. I like the way the bird is framed by the branches in the second but I think a little tighter crop would help. The white areas at the top and bottom tend to catch my eye.

 

[KmH]

How did you do the B&W conversions. The bird is lost in the background.

The photos have a lot of JPEG artifacts in them too.

I did a quick and dirty B&W conversion using a B&W adjustment layer in CS 5 and made the green in the background much lighter. I also cropped a little.

 

[AlanE]

Keith - I like your edit... I just used the filtered b/w in picasso, bumped it more to the red.

 

[amolitor]

I agree, and I think this sort of thing doesn't work well in b&w.

As KmH points out there's not enough separation between the bird and the background. Fixing the problem in b&w will make either the bird or the leaves look terrible since the basic problem is that the bird and the leaves are roughly the same value. If you fix it, you're pushing either the leaves (as KmH did) or the bird into the land of artificial tonality. As you can see from KhM's edit, the leaves appear brightly lit (which is perfectly credible by itself -- there could certainly be bright sub illuminating them from behind and creating that kind of soft glow) and the bird appears quite dark (as if shadowed -- by what?!)

 

[AlanE]

Thanks for commenting amolitor.... I did add a little background glow pp, so this might be what you're seeing. The sun was also straight overhead, coming through the leaves, which might have contributed.