More from my visit to the Welney Wildlife Trust " Norfolk "

[John G]

Hi
    I have another Kestrel and a couple of other images the Heron is on the same Island as the original Kestrel Image was captured. The Swan went a little defensive as it passed and confronted the camera equipment. As I said in the previous upload, I had only a few hours of post editing experience at the time of this trip and had only moved to RAW from JPEGS.

[Frank Fremerey]

Did you color key the swan or was the light such?

[John G]

Hi Frank
              I can't recall the editing tools I used, I know I had only been shooting in RAW and using LR5 or the CS6 free trial for a short period of time.
If it is important to you, I could dig out the original and see if I saved the changes, this will help identify some of my tool selections and the chosen values they were set at.
If I recall I edited it in colour then black and white and then I de-saturated a colour image and started to retrieve some colours. If you look at the title under the Swan, it refers to a third attempt at getting a white neck, I vaguely remember learning about the Quick Section " marching ants ".
I still have the RAW files from all my D800E kept work, so I will revisit some of this period of work in the coming winter. In this collection there are a few nice images of Ducks breaking the water after their dive, my early efforts did not do them justice, so I left them as unprocessed RAW images I will see if they are worth working with now I have a increased experience with post processing .

[Andrea B.]

That must have a great place to photographs birds! Very nice seeing the Kestrel.

I like the swan photo very much.

The center placement works well for the swan because of the lovely curve of the neck (which I might brighten up just by a very small amount). But, compositionally speaking, the two bottom photos would be less static if the crop were made so as to place the bird to one side or the other rather than right in the middle. I've attached an example, but you have to make up your own mind about such things because after all it is your artistic to be expressed, not mine. 

The 3rd photo shows some oversaturation of the dried grasses. They look a bit too red.

[John G]

Thank you Andrea
                             Composition, Cropping, over sharpening were very much part of my work flow  at this time, I have started to learn less is more and to lay off the sliders, as well as share the work flow across a few editing softwares.
These are the photo's that made my jaw drop, I had very little experience at attempting any pictures at this range. The D800E was purchased in July, the 300mm was purchased in August and the visit to the Welney Wildlife Trust was in October. I had a family member with me who had been working very hard for his photography, especially having completed diploma courses and having purchased very nice equipment. When I started viewing my images I was in awe of the images I was looking at, the long range images were in my mind to be deleted, and they became my keepers, so as a introduction to the critique I thought this would be a nice place to begin. I will put up a few from my D80 period as well,
this camera encouraged me out of the armchair very successfully.

[Andrea B.]

It's so nice to hear that you are enjoying this fine camera & lens combination.
I'm looking forward to seeing many more lovely bird captures from you.

I'm not sure which 300mm lens you purchased? I myself am very eager to get the 300E because of its light weight.