Location & Species
Here I have photographed and created a beautiful image of an amazing species from the Amazonian Rainforests called Scarlet Macaw. To achieve this image, I traveled to Ecuador and we flew from the capital of Quito to a small town called Coca. From Coca we traveled in a speed boat for 2.5 hours into the river, got off at a small patch of land, walked inside the forest for 30 minutes and then took another rowboat for 30 minutes to reach our lodge. I am sure this gives you an idea of how far deep we were in the amazon.
Gear/ Preparing the Scene – every time I speak about the amazon I mean taking pictures of wildlife in their most natural wildlife setting. This means lots of walking with heavy gear and lack of favorable light for photography. However one of the things that we did know what the exact location to find the bird. The area had a cover for when it rains and enough space to setup a tripod. However, since we were in a protected national park I was not allowed to use any source of additional light such as an external flash.
COMPOSING THE SHOT
Composing the image was one of the trickiest parts of the process. Look at the different images I got before finalizing on this image. As you can see I chose the image on the left as my final image. Now let me walk you through the editing process.
Step 1:
During my time in the field, I already decided what my composition was going to be. I wanted a tight frame of the head of bird with a lot of details and some reflection. For that I chose the image on the left.
The initial camera raw edit had me choose “daylight” as the white balance and drop the exposure to -0.15 to get some depth in the image. I also added more vibrance to the image and left the remaining settings untouched.
The image was now ready to be edited.
The next step was to crop the image and as discussed earlier I decided to crop it tight as seen in the below image.
Once cropped I started working on the adjustment layers. I added a layer of brightness and contrast and increased both to my desired numbers.
Next I adjusted the overall contrast of the image to get the rainforest look using curves adjustment layer. Curves adjustment layer gives me control of choosing the areas of the image that I selectively want to control as seen below.
Image has started taking shape and is getting closer to the final image. Next up – hue saturation.
To emphasize that scarlet color and to stand out in the dark background I added more contrast to the reds.
Next I selectively added more brightness to the eyes using the quick selection tool and adding brightness using the adjustment layer.
My image was almost ready for the final steps of resizing and sharpening.
Now it’s time to save it in the right profile.
Now it’s time to save it in the right profile.
For web prints I use sRGB while for prints I use Adobe RGB
The final step is to save it as a jpeg at the highest resolution as shown below:
