Robbie I fully realize how difficult bird photography is from my own experience, it’s one of the most difficult photographic pastimes there is and good images are few and far between.RobbieA wrote:Some lovely images Mark... sorry I'm not up to your standards with my "plastic" pics Greg.. The entire idea for me as a photographer is to get smooth backgrounds and not like a birder would want with recognizable backgrounds. Please also do not kid yourself, it takes a great deal or work and patience to get the shots...
Your images have always been of excellent quality and show great determination in pursuit of the ultimate, (beyond my own level of dedication, I do snap-shooting by comparison) no question, I just have my own personal preferences when it comes to PP that’s all.
Maybe it’s my monitor that’s giving me the impression of highly detailed painted glass models rather than real live birds I’m not sure on the exact cause, I was blaming slightly over done PP but maybe I was wrong and the real live birds actually look that way in real life, it’s just the impression of artificiality I get when viewing those otherwise splendid photos of the Kingfisher and the Swallows.
Put it this way, if you were to put the RAW converter into ‘auto’ or ‘default’ and then do nothing but produce a JPEG ‘as is’ would the result be closer to the real live birds or the images you have shown us? Or half way between, or different altogether from either the real thing or the photos?
I only ask from an interested bird photographer point of view who’s probably more interested in the birds (their diversity, their specialization, and reasonably accurate recording thereof) than the actual photography, not from a nitpicking point of view.
Greg