American crows are a challenging subject to photograph. They move quickly, they reflect sunlight like a mirror, and they blend in to the shadows. This poses challenges not only for capturing a shot, but for editing.
The trick is to maintain the look of black feathers while still being able to capture all of their exquisite detail. Make the image too dark, and the crow is just a silhouette. Make it too light and the crow looks like a pigeon.
And then there's the challenge of making sure everything else in the picture still looks discernable. I just use the photo editor on my iPad, nothing fancy (yet). It was difficult to keep this sliver of peanut from turning into a bleached out blob when bringing up some of the details in the crow.
It's a lot easier to make the photo look good when the image is basically a portrait.
But it's nice to have more going on. This juvenile has seen me with a camera plenty of times, but the shutter sound on my new camera was a curiosity to them. It made for a cute picture, and I like how the leaves in the foreground came out.
Back-lit action shots are hard. I had to bring the contrast way down to get the details in Junior's face as he flew toward me, but in doing so that made the image appear grainy, so I had to sacrifice some of the details. I went for artistic over crisp.
Getting the details on this poor, tired, hungry, dirty mama crow was easy enough, but balancing it with the details of the debris in the alley was a challenge. I would have liked it to make the shadows and the debris pop a little more. That's one of the things I miss about the darkroom, being able to dodge and burn. I should probably invest in a good editing software. Anyone have any recommendations?
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I post obsessively about my neighborhood crows as I learn about them. If you would like to learn along with me, please follow me!