Portraits

[Bobobird]

Dabbling with black and white recently. After many many tries, got these to appear reasonably ok to my eyes.

As always, constructive C&C is welcomed and appreciated.

#1 - Pink flamingo


#2 - Swan

[Shadowman]

2nd one looks best, something odd going on in the background of the first.

[Donald]

Bobo - My first reaction to both is that I would have liked to see slightly more of the head/beginning of the neck come into the frame. I love the idea of the composition and would not suggest trying to change that, but it felt as if you had cropped just, very slightly, too near the top of the head in each case.

[Rob Douglas]

I prefer the 2nd shot. As Donald mentioned, I too would like to see just a bit more of the neck, but not much. The left of the background in the first shot is distracting to me and I feel the flamingo is about a stop under exposed. Great work over all bobo.

[Bobobird]

Thanks guys.

#1 - crop easily fixed. Reason was his neck is long and very narrow which appeared a mismatch against the big head.
Background was darkened to bring out the light colour of the bird but not too much. I did consider almost all dark similar to #2 but then probably forgot. The head was lightened a bit to give it a softer look. Up close flamingos are not quite as soft and fluffy as we think they are!

#2 - crop is easily fixed. Reason for not doing part of the neck is that this one had a shaved neck and I wanted to avoid cloning it out.

EDIT *************

Shoot! Did it again - did not save the finished product before crop/frame. I do not have a nailed down workflow yet so a redo is going to be time consuming and will probably come out different too.

So will just leave this as lessons learned for reference next time such shots come up.

As always your freely give advice is totally appreciated. Happy new year all.