Image Manipulation

I've mentioned before that I'm not averse to a bit of image manipulation, quite the opposite, I love it. I'm not a very patient photographer, I'm not one that suffers for my craft, by that I mean I'm not in the field 18 hours a day from dawn to dusk in extremes of temperatures and ridiculous humidities to get the perfect shot. My methodology is get the shot that's presented to you at the time and place thats suits your current situation. This means of course that you don't get the best light or conditions required to make the images that you would like. Most photographers know that the best light ( it's all about light after all) is early morning or late evening, the Golden Hours. Sometimes I can get up and get out early but not often for various reasons. This is where photo editing can help. There are photographic Amish types who shun any form of image manipulation, SOOC is their religion (Straight Out Of Camera). Poor deluded puritan fools, the camera itself is doing its best to display a pleasing image by carrying out all sorts of in-camera edits. The Pagan types like me love the various photo editing programs.

To illustrate my thoughts here's a picture of a Red-Shouldered Hawk taken back in March 2009 at Corkscrew Swamp in Florida. Corkscrew has a superb raised walkway through the Cypress Swamp with huge of trees covered in moss and lichens. As we were walking round there was this Hawk just sitting there watching us.  I took a few hasty shots then realized the lighting was awful so delved into my backpack and fitted my flash. The first image is the result, I've done a bit of tweaking in Capture One my favorite editing package but not too much. The problem with this image is the background, I could have used a smaller f stop than the f/8 I used, this would have blurred the background a bit. The hawk is nice but your eye is drawn to the background not the bird itself. This is where image manipulation can help.

Red-shouldered Hawk

The second image was given the same Capture One edits then exported to an old version of Photoshop. In Photoshop I used the selection tools to cut out the Red-shoulder and the branch it was sitting on, from there I copied the selection to another layer and blurred the background underneath. Probably took me 5 minutes work sitting at my desk drinking a cup of tea. Makes a better picture in my opinion. Of course I could have waited for hours for the Hawk to move to a more suitable perch, but then I wouldn't have seen the Little Blue Heron.

Red-shouldered Hawk

Little Blue Heron