Egret Fishing Alone

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Point Lobos, California

Mamiya 330f, 180mm, Kodak 100S, handheld

-- Andrew Y. Kim (andy_roo@mit.edu), January 15, 1999

Answers

I have an old rolli that took terrible pictures until I started putting it on a tripod. This hand held image seems to have a loss of sharpness. Although I like to see birds in their environment, there is too much out-of-focus environment in this shot for my tastes.

-- Larry Korhnak (lvk@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu), January 15, 1999.

Although your bird looks soft, the plane of focus that is visible in the water before and behind the bird indicates that you probably got decent focus on film and that the scanner added the softness. It could also be movement blur causing the softness obvious in the bird's head and neck.

As to composition, I'd crop the top just below the white objects removing the whole dark area down to the mass of floating weeds. That leaves an image of about 6x7 proportions and includes the major environmental elements. The lighting and color rendition are a bit flat, this might work better as a B&W.

Frank

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), January 15, 1999.


Larry,

Thanks for the comments. The lack of a tripod definitely killed getting better depth of field. A cropped image around the bird where things are sharp looks better to me, too! Otherwise, I definitely did blow out the highlights on the bird.

For sharpness, the Mamiya does pretty well handheld, if done properly (in this case, the camera was sitting on a boulder with my hands around it). I think I shot at around 1/250 or 1/500 at f5.6 anyways. It's tough to say anything about sharpness in an MF slide when scanning and compression are considered. Within the limits of a 600 dpi flatbed scanner, a closeup of the bird shows pretty decent feather detail.

-- Andrew Y. Kim (andy_roo@mit.edu), January 15, 1999.


Frank,

Thanks for the cropping tip, I like it. The white objects are waves breaking against the rocks. I like including the rocks as a setting, but since they're so out of focus, you're right that the image works better without them.

I tried the grey scale thing and didn't like it personally. The blues are a little richer in the original slide, but the color is indeed flat even there. Any suggestions on what might be a good warming filter in this case that wouldn't tinge the bird's white color?

-- Andrew Y. Kim (andy_roo@mit.edu), January 15, 1999.


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