Pelican in Flight

[FootLoose]

No boring blue-sky background here

#1.





#2.






#3.


C&C welcome.

[fotugraphy]

Wow! you did a fantastic job to capture them in flight.

[flashback]

Great shots, and who could complain about the background? For me #2 is the best overall.

[Jill]

Just perfect, well done to keep the momentum up.
I spent a extended period of time in Australia and got to be known as the Pelican Lady as I was always taking photos of them.
I find them fascinating.

[NorthernFocus]

Really a nice sequence. Well done.

[dje]

Good shots Greg, the background works well for me. The light in these shots is refreshingly different.

Dave

[Stagecoach]

Good series Greg, and a bonus background.

[IzzieK]

Where were you standing to be able to get that?! Gracious indeed! Couldn't fault this one....simply beautiful!!

[Shadowman]

Nicely done.

[Loose Canon]

Are these, by chance, composites Greg?

[terrib]

I was reading through the comments and thinking the same thing as Terry. The Pelican looks separated from the background somehow and I wasn't sure if it was just selective sharpening of the bird or a composite or something else entirely. Great job on capturing the sharpness of the bird in flight.

[Downrigger]

My thoughts are similar to Terrys' and Terri's - first these are really special/very fine. But second, the pelican(s) almost look cut and pasted onto the background here - because their sharpness pops them forward so much. Part of it, I think is the angle of light that enhances edges on the bird.

[Brownbear]

Great set... I've photographed a lot of pelicans flying over ocean waters so the background looks natural to me, soft beautifully blue ocean waters, beautifully focused in flight bird. My those white pelicans have large eyes.

Perhaps the 2nd image (my favourite for the wing position) is just a wee bit sharp around the wings? If I look hard enough I think I can see a faint sharpening halo along the outer portion of the upper wing, and lower portion of the bottom wing?

[JohnRostron]

Great shots. I prefer #3 because of the unusual wing position.

John

[FootLoose]

Thank you to everyone for viewing and commenting.

It seems I might have mislead some people with my opening comment. I was referring to my own comments about the boring blue skies here of late. I have mentioned this in my posts on a few occasions, most recently here (Gonna Take it Higher...)

These images are not composites. If they were, I would have indicated as much. Here is one of the originals, unprocessed apart from converting to 8-bit, downsizing and saving as jpg.



They were taken from the headland, looking down over the water. In the image below, you can just see the handrailing that I was leaning over in the upper right corner of the frame. This picture wasn't taken on the same day as the shots of the pelican. On that day, the tide was in and the seas were up. In the shots above, you can see some straightish looking shadows on the water - they are from the cliff.



From this location, you can see the pelicans flying across the top of the water from a couple of miles away (depending on your eyesight). I sometimes scan for them through the lens, and track them until I think they are close enough for a shot. On this day, I got lucky.

I took this pictures late last year but wasn't happy with my processing. Recently - because of the relentless crappy blue-sky hot weather, I have been spending more time with photoshop than with my camera, learning new and different techniques. I brought the sharpness up in these shots with the High Pass filter set to Vivid Light blend mode. I tamed the background with a few curves adjustment layers applied to different parts of the image, and then simply painted down some of the recalcitrant whites with the paint brush.

They may be a tad over-sharpened, as Shane has noted. The psds look ok, so maybe that is an effect of the jpg conversion. I was very happy with the way the processing lifted the pelican off the background.

[Loose Canon]

These images are not composites.

I was just curious Greg. Just asking is all!

I certainly didn’t mean anything at all derogatory! I do plenty of compositing myself and consider it a “normal”, acceptable technique with what I like to shoot.

Hope you didn’t take it wrong!

[FootLoose]

No need for apologies, Terry, I didn't take your comments in a negative sense. In fact, I thought it was rather complimentary . I'm sorry if my reply seemed abrupt, it wasn't intended that way.