Taken at the Potter Park Zoo in Lansing, MI. The shadowing to the left of his eye(that runs vertical through the entire photo) is actually from the wire cage he was behind. Call it extreme semi-transparent foreground bokeh if you like. ;-) This shadow almost makes it appear as if he was backlit from the left and frontlit from the right of the camera. The original shot was very questionable and I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to use it or not. I think I got pretty lucky.
PP included:
Brightness
Contrast
Shadows
Pulling back the highlights quite a bit
Increasing the yellows saturation only
Cloning some of his iris in his eye to make it stand out a little more and then smudging it to blend it in
Removed a few scratches from his beak
Clarify
Noise removal
USM
Softening the background tree to try and dilute some remaining noise(which also softened the upper feathers)
Crop
Resize
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I see I still have much to learn. To be quite honest, I sped through the pp'ing of this shot to get it submitted in time. I should have taken a little more time and done it right. In retrospect, there are quite a few small errors I made in producing this shot - things that I critically saw after the fact.
But thanks for the comments everyone. I hope to submit better shots in the future.
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Not quite sure why this didn't do as well as the other eagle shots. I actually like this one much better than the first head shot because he doesn't have a huge reflection in his eyes. You captured this bird well, he looks like he is very proud of who he is. Great softness in the whiter feathers.
I remarked on another eagle that he looked like an old guy in a brown feather suit. This one (it must be the headshot approach) reminds me a portrait of the CEO of a large, rich corporation, that you'd see hanging on the wall of the boardroom.
My goodness a juvenile bald, amazing capture, lovely sharpness on the feathers and good capture of him having his head tilted, if it was straight on, would have lost the mood. 9
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