Help to make image better

[cmrardy]

Please help. I like this picture because the of the fish and the bear, but I have been struggling with post processing on this image. I have played with this photo a couple different times and I am not happy with it. I have tried different crops and i just haven't been satisfied with it. This is after some work in Lightroom and Photoshop, I can post the original if that will help.

[FootLoose]

That is a cool image, Jeanne, I can see why you want to show it at its best. It might help if you can tell exactly what it is you are unhappy with: ie just the crop, or something about the PP?

[cmrardy]

I think the shore line bothers me the most - the fact that it chops the photo in half. Also the birds are blown out, i am not sure i can do much about that since i was shooting on auto and jpg at the time. I have changed to shooting in full manual and raw since this was taken.

[rpcrowe]

Jeanne, you caught a wonderful moment in this shot. IMO, the image would benefit from cropping as close to filling the frame with the three important subjects: Bear, fish and birds as you can possibly do while maintaining the quality that is acceptable to you. When cropping, you could place the shoreline/treeline virtually anywhere you desire.

Wildlife photography benefits greatly from the use of lens with focal lengths as long as possible. I don't know what focal length lens you used to capture this moment but, a lens like the Canon 55-250mm would probably be the minimum that I would want to use even when shooting with a crop format camera...

It is a benefit to shoot in RAW because of post processing control but, I don't necessarily think that a photographer (especially a fairly new photographer) would benefit greatly by shooting in manual exposure mode over aperture priority...

Keep up the good work!

[chauncey]

Better is a very subjective term...this looks like an image that was shot at the right time with a lot of errors.
jpeg/too short a lens/overexposed to name a few, but you already know that. What PP software do you use?

You live in a area that is teeming in potential of great images...keep on learning and shooting.

[cmrardy]

That picture was taken with a Sony HX1. Unfortunately, I didn't have the option of a different lens on that fishing trip. I now have a Nikon D5100 with a couple different entry level lenses. I have used Photoshop for years, but just started using Lightroom 4 last fall. I will pull the original and see if i can crop tighter and try to correct the exposure. Thank you for your help.