Animals in Mauritius C&C please

Hi guys,

June last year (wow, I can't believe it's taken me a year to get to processing these...) I took these shots on a trip to Mauritius. I was very new to my camera and had only had it a couple of months.

I would love some feedback on how to improve the photography and PP. I'm struggling with making myself think, wow. I'm trying to learn, not build an ego so feel free to be brutal.

Click on the images to view them bigger.

Black Swan (I'm unsure about the exposure / contrast, I think it may be a little dark.)

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Hi Peter;

Here's a real quick run-down...

Black Swan - just needs Levels adjusting, and then a bit of Saturation & Sharpening...

Flamingos - are exposed correctly for the bird - but are OOF. Not much you can do about the dark water w/out a great deal of playing in PP, and probably not worth the effort for an OOF image...

Green Heron - Personally I would leave as is; un-cropped - it shows the giant lily pads off... It does need a Levels adj. though to lighten it a tad...

Water Lily - I would lighten a tad - but that's my taste... Move the Midtones slider left in Levels to do so...

First Monkey - beyond redemption... It's OOF, so not much you can do... 1/60 at 300mm doesn't help!

Second Monkey - Levels again needs adjusting...

Bird - Is a type of Bulbul - but not sure which... Again, sliding the Midtones to the left in Levels will lighten the shot, and you can use the eye-dropper in Levels to adjust the White-Balance...

All quite simple adjustments that will improve (most of) the images no end...

Cheers;

Lee

I tend to agree with above^

Nice photos in all.and the lily is really a water lotus! They are stunning flowers when in bloom.

To me the biggest thing I'm seeing is that they all look a tad bit dark on my monitor. Since they all look pretty dark (to one degree or another), the first thing I would suggest is to check your monitors calibration...make sure you don't have you monitor set too bright (and thus are over-compensating with your PP).

Over-all, your compositions look pretty good to me. Everything looks pretty well framed and any other obvious mistakes have already been pointed out. The only other thing I would really suggest is to pay a little more attention to the lighting while you're shooting. Where possible, try and find lighting or angles where the lighting better compliments your subjects (such as with the bird).

It looks like you're on the right track...a think a few adjustments here and there and you'd have some nice shots.

Peace,
Jim

Gail is right. Water lilies bloom on the surface; lotus is held above the water on a stem.

The first monkey shot looks like movement blur to me, not OOF. I've had "slight" luck in fixing these a "little" with PS smart sharpen. Again, the rule is: if you can't fix it in five minutes, it's beyond redemption.

Hi everyone. Thanks for the comments. I have these pics in RAW so I'll take another shot at these pics tonight and see if I can improve them.

With the Flamingos, I'm not sure why they are so blury. They look good in RAW but the jpg compression seems to have messed with them. Any suggestions to stop this happening?

Also, with lightening the pics, I'm never sure how far to push the exposure up or down in PP to get it 'correct'. Obviously it's different for each photo but can anybody suggest a good guide or rule of thumb to know when the photo has the right exposure? Should I just try to center the histogram?

Thanks
Peter

Last night I took another shot at the Flamingos and the Monkey, are these an improvement? I was trying to play with the curves in DPP but need to learn more about how to handle them...

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