Cwgrizz's 366 in 2016
- Thread starter cwgrizz
- Start date
Ha! Luckily, I am not quite to that point yet. Some days are better than others, however. I just looked up and saw it and decided to shoot it on a whim.Nice series of the birds. The Moon is cool too, especially when you say you were looking straight up. If I had looked straight up to take a picture there would be a man down
I had a whole host of shots of the Curve-Billed Thrasher, but all had plain sky. (Lately the skies have been cloudless and not very interesting). I needed to practice some more with GIMP techniques. The first shot was more for technique than the end result. I didn't really pick a great section of sky to use for the first photo. I should have moved the sky background around a little to get it to compliment the first bird shot, but the technique worked. After that attempt I tried it again with the second modified shot. I took a little more time with positioning the sky so the bird stood out some more. Nikonpup, on the second one are you saying that it needed the sky blurred out some, like applying a Gaussian blur?
Thanks for all of your feedback. As time permits, I may look for a better sky shot to play with for some of my bird in plain sky shots. Ha!
Yes I agree with that. I just grabbed a landscape shot with clouds and threw it together. After I got done and looked at it, I thought the same. The gray cloud gave no contrast to separate it from the bird's head. I probably could have just moved the landscape shot around to get a better crop so it would be more of a contrast from the bird.
That is a good point. On this one, I did move the landscape shot crop around to get the contrast, but I see what you are saying about it looking fake (GIMPshopped). Ha! Actually, I do have one heck of a lens. Ha! I shot 450 shots for focus stacking. LOL
Time to play some more.
Great shot. i would not try and get the clouds more out of focus. Sometimes I see images where people try and get the background out of focus and they go way overboard. I see this a lot with Gaussian blur in PS.
They over do it and it doesn't look natural nor pleasing to the eye.
Thanks Pete for your feedback. I used all kinds of blur in GIMP to get what I have. Ha! The first two I worked on yesterday, the background clouds were too sharp and really looked fake. This one is a redo of the 2nd one I did yesterday. They were all done for the exercise/practice of using the techniques to switch out backgrounds to get rid of the boring. GIMP=Poor mans Photoshop, but I figure if I ever get to the point of using PS, I will be a genius. Ha!
I used be a hard core Linux guy. To me Gimp is more difficult than PS.
@Blacktop, I can only imagine that GIMP is harder to use than PS because I have never even seen PS (maybe a youtube video or two). I feel that the two programs have similarities ie Layers, Layer Masks, etc. and the switch over from GIMP to PS would be pretty straight forward. I think that PS probably has more "tools" to tweak things in one step, where GIMP may require a few steps to do the same thing. All of this is just an assumption on my part and you know what it is to assume. Ha!
Let's put it this way concerning my PS experience. If I was to learn to count from 1-100 in a new language, I would be at 2 right now.