Brown on a gray day

[dadas115]

I was out this past weekend near Freeport, TX when I ran across this brown pelican perched on a post of a fishing pier. It was a pretty drab, gray day (light which I like to shoot in) and I was able to get pretty close to the bird before it got too alarmed.

The first shot is exactly what came out of the camera just scaled down for web viewing so you can see what I started with. The picture was taken with a Canon EOS 350D camera and an old EF 500mm f/4.5L USM lens. I used a railing to rest the lens on instead of using a tripod. At first I was shooting at f/4.5 but decided the shot could use some more DOF so I ended up stopping down to f/5.6 which was a challenge because the shutter speed was only 1/100 sec at this setting and ISO 200.

For the second shot I did a little cropping and tried to fade out the hard line (from a board in the background) that had formed a line that was going into the bird’s forehead. I found this line to be unpleasant and hopefully did a decent job with the clone tool to reduce its effect. I then went ahead and boosted the contrast a bit and adjusted the saturation slightly. Finally I applied USM to boost the sharpness a tad. I don’t know if the leg at the bottom right works all that well for me yet but I didn’t have a lot of choice to get the whole bill in the picture and keep the aspect ratio where I wanted it.

For the third and forth pictures I just played around with some different crops to see if they worked any better. I sort of like the abstractness of the last picture as I find the shapes and textures quite interesting.

Thanks for looking,

Greg