The eye! Get the eye!

 

As I get more comfortable with layers and masks in Photoshop CS6 (meaning that I don’t need alcohol to get me through a Photoshop session), I can go back to many of my bird pictures to see if I can make something decent out of them.

Here are four that I worked with this morning using adjustment layers and masks:

Unknown bird

 

Rock pigeon (Columba livia)

 

Brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis)

 

One thing that I have learned since January when I started birding again, after a 35-year sabbatical, is to focus on the eye of the bird.

Previously I thought that if you just focus on the bird’s body, everything else will turn out alright. I mean, the eye and the body are just inches apart, so what’s the problem?

The problem is that these cameras really do know what they are doing, but it still takes a human being to tell them what to do. Look at the second picture, the one of the rock pigeon. Can you tell where I focused? It should be easy to see that it wasn’t the eye.

I would really have loved that picture if the eye had been the focal point. As it is, well, it’s a picture of a rock pigeon for my collection, reminding me that I still need a great picture of a rock pigeon eating, drinking, or flying.

 

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