Title: Reflection of a Heron
Location: Stop me if you’ve heard this one….Double Bluff Beach, Whidbey Island, Washington, USA
Settings
| ISO | 1250 |
| Focal Length | 300mm |
| Shutter Speed | 1/80 |
| Aperture | f/13 |
| Exp Comp | -1 2/3 |
| Camera | Canon EOS 5D |
| Lens | Canon 28-300mm L |
While I did increase the blacks a little in this image, there is no grand Photoshop trickery going on here. I moved close enough to the heron so he blended into the rocks behind him. I also underexposed the image to help bring the shutter speed into a handheld range as I didn’t have my tripod this day. Although it appears as the bird has an eye socket in the reflection, this is only caused by the ripples on the water.
In Photoshop Lightroom:
White Balance to 5000K
Blacks +14
Clarity +45
Vibrance +29
Saturation +40
Photograph Copyright Peter West Carey
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See…this is why I love photography. Every ounce of my brain is trying to tell me that you ‘shopped out the bird with ripples in the water. But some part of me is trying to figure out how you did it ‘in camera’. It’s a juxtaposition of knowing what kind of photographer you are (the ‘in-camera’ type) and what is physically possible. It’s knowing that cameras are based in the world of physics, and that physics can be bent and reshaped to fit the desires of the photographer.
That is amazing to me, and if there’s one thing the ‘net has brought to us all…it’s the inspiration of people like you and photographs like this. Whether or not we know much about the photo (and you are sharing your info so we know about this photo) – it’s shots like this that drive myself (and presumably others) to try to duplicate and mimic the photo. It’s not that we can think we can do it better…but that the discovery is going to blend into our own style somehow and that we will eventually learn from it. Even if we don’t fully achieve the goal (to duplicate the shot), we will somehow learn something along the way.
We’re not photographers. We’re optical scientists.