For this challenge my goal was to photograph an animal that is known for its color and then do a black and white of it. So in the end I settled on a photo of this Blue-and-yellow Macaw aka an Ara Ararauna. By losing its vibrant colors through a b/w conversion I felt that the Macaw had basically lost its identity. In order to portray this loss I tried to darkened the Macaw enough so didn't stand out too much against the all black background.
I'm a bit apprehensive entering this photo, but I really want some feedback on it.
Not much done in terms of post production other than cropping, sharpening, desaturating the original photograph, applied a quadtone, converted back to grayscale and then dropping the brightness down to -70 and upping the contrast to +50.
The color version for anyone that is interested:
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The title isn't really all that bad and does draw attention to the fact that it's a very colourful bird, robbed of its beautiful plumage. I like the offset of macaw to the left (though I don't think the bulk if voters did, sadly), the focus is great and the dof captures a ton of detail including a good sharp eye. The one suggestion I would make is to jack up the ISO to 500 or 640; one of the few things about Canon that I do envy is their ISO performance. That'll bring out the whites, and imho it's always better to do that as much as possible in-camera than relying solely on pp, though a little more contrast wouldn't hurt.
Overall a very nice shot that finished just out of the 6s so not bad work at all. Keep on shooting and entering!
Feel free to PM me,
Susan
Thanks for the tip on using a higher ISO setting to help bring out the whites Susan. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I'm out shooting.
The title isn't really all that bad and does draw attention to the fact that it's a very colourful bird, robbed of its beautiful plumage. I like the offset of macaw to the left (though I don't think the bulk if voters did, sadly), the focus is great and the dof captures a ton of detail including a good sharp eye. The one suggestion I would make is to jack up the ISO to 500 or 640; one of the few things about Canon that I do envy is their ISO performance. That'll bring out the whites, and imho it's always better to do that as much as possible in-camera than relying solely on pp, though a little more contrast wouldn't hurt.
Overall a very nice shot that finished just out of the 6s so not bad work at all. Keep on shooting and entering!
Unfortunately, macaws look better in color. That being said, this is still a wonderful image. I love the fact that he is positioned to the left of the center. It's a great shot
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