[ed34]

took this on the weekend .all comments welcome tfl.

sean

[Rob Barron]

Well done Sean, you have done a good job here. The side pose works nicely with the blurred background.

The focus does seem a tad soft but that might be due to heavy compression for the web. I think you could get a greater dynamic range into the shot, ie make sure you have all the levels from pure white to pure black. The eye would lift a bit more to separate from the black in front of it and the catchlight which IS there could be brightened to liven up the whole face.

One bit of advice, if using a lens with a wide aperture, the closer the swan is, the less depth of field you will have to play with and although we want the wide aperture to get the blurring BG, we need enough DoF to keep all parts of the head and neck in focus which might mean shutting down to around f3.5 - f4 rather than f2.8 or below. You can always go for a slightly slower shutter speed to balance that off as I am sure there was plenty of light to play with hand held.

Swans are never easy as the lighting is difficult to get right. They are often either too dark or have lots of burnt out areas so well done.

Cheers,
Rob

[ed34]

thanks for the comments rob ,i'll try that tomoorrow with the apperture/shutter speed as i'm off back over there,hope its not raining,

sean

[Dave]

Agree you got the exposure spot on .....some great detail in the shot

[danpen]

Nice shot Sean.

As usual, great advice from Rob. I'd just like to add that it took me a while to notice that there are a number of water drops on the swan which are really nice, a little bit of sharpening along with some levels or curves work to improve the dynamic range would really pay off.

[ed34]

cheers guys for your comments, i did do a little photoshop on it ,slight levels tweek,a bit of sharpening,but my photoshop skills are not good to say the least, but i will keep trying

sean