Story of the Image
Peru is one of the most amazing countries in South America, as many fortunate enough to have travelled there know. While it is best known for the Machu Pichu world heritage site, as well as its rainbow mountains, very few know that Peru is also the country with the highest number of endemic bird species in the world.
Location
The rough waters of Pucusana, a small fishing village, is just an hour drive from the capital city of Lima. My team and I boarded a motorboat to venture into the ocean where these birds’ nest, and were lucky to find a few nesting on the walls. However, we were also distracted by a pair of Humboldt penguins swimming very close to our boat. While the Penguins are a specialty birds that are found only in South America I was focused on the cormorants.
Gear/Preparing The Scene
Shooting birds from a boat in the ocean is an activity that requires both practice and patience. 90% of your images will be out of focus, and that is ok! It was the same for me as I couldn’t use a tripod, and the waves were constantly swaying the boat from side to side!
To get a shot, I knew I had to position myself so my body did not move much. I anchored my back to one of the poles to get a steady shot. At the time of taking the photo our boat was approximately 50 mts from the birds which meant that we were not disturbing the birds in any way. As shorebirds living close to humans the birds are already used to boats and humans.
Composing The Shot
The moment I saw the nests, I knew this needed to be a vertical composition for two reasons:
- The way the rock was shaped and;
- I did not want other nests to be part of the image
This was the only way I could isolate this nest and drive the full attention of my audience to the nest.
Post Processing
Below is the raw image that I selected to process. As one can see, the image is not perfectly composed. I had to correct that in Photoshop.
Above is the how the crop tool looks like.
Initial camera raw edits:
The raw file was edited to reduce the brightness and highlights to counter the over exposed parts of the birds following the addition of color. I also added more vibrance to the image.
In color correction mode I reduced the yellows and added some greens to fix the tones in the image.
Next, I created a duplicate background layer to run shadow highlights. The reason I created a duplicate layer was to avoid creating a non-destructive layer. This means we cannot delete his sole layer in the future if we wish not to have it. We would have to undo every other layer before we ultimately reach it.
In the next step, I add a layer of Curves to give more depth to the image. II dropped the input to 137 and output to 125.
I then add a layer of Vibrance to get more out of the beak, especially the reds and oranges.
Lastly, I added more Contrast to the image. This created more impact overall as the birds stood out against the dark walls creating more attention on the birds.
Image is resized as per the following:
Next up is the image sharpening. I always use Photoshop’s built-in sharpening tool, which has always given me good results.
The radius was set to 0.9 and amount to 107, as that gave a naturalistic look along with the right amount of Sharpening for my tastes.
My image is almost ready, and all that is left now is to save it to the right profile.
For web prints I use sRGB. For physical prints, I use Adobe RGB
The final step is to save it as a JPEG at the highest resolution as shown below:
About the Bird
Red-Legged Cormorant can be commonly found perched on jetties, inshore rocks and cliffs in Humboldt current. They can be spotted along the Pacific coast in countries like Peru, Chile, some across Argentina up to Strait of Magellan. This non-colonial seabird is seen feeding in small groups or pairs and as scattered individuals. Unlike other Cormorants, they are not seen wing spreading which is unusual and this species does not show sexual dimorphism.
