Duck picture (creative criticism welcome)

bombular · Jul 28, 2015

I am a starting out photographer and took this picture of which I though was decent. I have attached the unedited and the edited version. Please give me tips on the editing and thoughts on the overall picture.
A picture I got this evening of a duck in a small pond taken on my Panasonic G7 with 100-300mm lens @ f/5.6, 1/640th, and ISO 250.

Unedited:

Edited:

BrickHouse · Jul 29, 2015

Nice photo and nice job with the edit. There seems to be enough detail that I bet you could do just a smidge of noise reduction where you brought up the shadows.

Didereaux · Jul 30, 2015

You will find that using SPOT focus on birds against bright backgrounds will give much better detail on the bird. Do not worry about blowing out the background, the bird is the subject.

JamesScott86 · Jul 30, 2015

Beautiful shot - so pretty too.

Hunter58 · Aug 1, 2015

Nice job on the edit. I agree you might be able to pull a little more shadows out and I think you could crop a little tighter as it looks like too much space above the bird.

Braineack · Aug 1, 2015

I prefer the original.

robbins.photo · Aug 1, 2015

Well, not sure how creative my criticism would be, but I'll go with Hunter58, I'd probably look at cropping this one differently.

mnmcote · Aug 2, 2015

I love the shot... Great action and water drops flying all around. I prefer the look of the water in the original. so I thought a lil more light on the subject worked well instead of pulling up the shadows... Just enough to be what I would expect to see in the evening light. And I agree on the advice for a slightly tighter crop...

Tim Tucker · Aug 2, 2015

Cool. Your edit is pretty good, but I would note two things that make big differences.
1) Clone out the bright drop right next to the eye. Eyes are very magnetic in photographs as are bright spots, they seem to be competing.
2) Treat the background differently. By increasing the contrast of both areas together the contrast in the water makes it a little more difficult to make out the duck. By keeping the water bright and the contrast down the duck stands out more.

WesternGuy · Aug 2, 2015

One aspect of my camera's system that I find useful when shooting dark subjects against lighter backgrounds is exposure compensation (EC). In this case, you have a backlit bird, which is darker, against a slightly lighter background. In this case, I would have tried an EC between +½ to maybe as much as +1 or even +1 1/3 stops. This may blow out the background, but, personally, I am not too worried about that, as, in this case, it is the duck that is important.

WesternGuy