About The Image
Telling stories with tropical birds is my aim through photography. The most important thing is that the birds have a nice pose, making for a beautiful overall composition. Here, I tried to portray the partnership and bonding between a male and female Toucan during my photo trip in Costa Rica with this image. The challenge, however, was the harshly lit habitat.
Here’s a fun fact about toucans – Toucans are part of the family Ramphastidae, which includes about 40 different species of toucans, as well as the smaller toucanets and aracaris. 1 The one thing they all have in common is a bill that is disproportionately large compared to the rest of their bodies.
Location
This setup is on the northern edge of Costa Rica, right by the border of Nicaragua along the San Carlos River. The closest human habitation is found in the small town of Boca Tapada.
Gear
- Camera – Canon 1dx Mark II
- Lens – Canon 600mm F4 IS2 F4 L USM
- Tripod – Gitzo carbon fiber and Wimberly WH2
Preparing The Scene
In terms of gear I was equipped with two lenses, and I had to choose one. This lens would either be a Canon 600mm f/4 or a 70-200mm f/2.8. The 600 was a bit too long and the 70-200 was on the shorter side. While my mind leaned towards the shorter lens, I knew I could achieve the depth of field (blurry background) only with a 600. With that, the only option I had was to walk back 20 ft (6.1 m) from my initial point to cover as much as possible. Birds feed and leave quickly so I had to be fast. This meant I had no time to setup my tripod. I ran back and shot handheld which is something I don’t recommend for people to do, due to the heavy lenses. Regardless, it is something we cannot escape at some point in their photography career.
Composing The Shot
While looking through the frame I had only one thing in mind— to get both the birds in the frame while leaving some space around it. However, since they are large birds of about 47 – 61 cm, it was not easy to get the best angle (a front pose showing clear feathers) knowing that they were restless and making lots of movement. The best plan was to shoot nonstop at a very high frame rate to try and get as many images as possible and hope that some are in the desired position.
Lighting
I chose to use the natural available light and afternoon seemed like the best time to photograph these beauties. The sun was low, which made the light soft and didn’t create harsh shadows on the birds.
I also chose to shoot only when there was a cloud cove, which is similar to using a giant softbox. The work of a softbox in studio photography is to soften the harsh light emitted by a flash. In this case, the sun is the flash and the cloud is the softbox.
Post Processing
I selected 4 images to start my work because they are sharper than the rest of the images.
The most important part was to get them in sharp focus, beyond which the remaining work needs to be carried out in post-processing.
Initial Camera Raw Edits
As a first step, I would always fix the white balance of the image. In this case, I chose “as shot” and played with the exposure to fix some of those bright patches on the neck of the birds. However, since these areas were completely burnt due to the harsh light, I had to pull down the highlights even further.
The next step was to fix the colors. Here I increased the saturation of just the green tones down by +7 points and reduced yellow by -2
Once I corrected the most obvious settings in Camera Raw, I opened the file in Photoshop.
The next step was to add a new layer to edit the background. To make the perfect selection, I
used the option Select > Subject.
While this does a pretty decent job you will notice that the selection is not clean and there are many areas that need work. For this I use the Quick Selection tool from the tool dashboard and select the “Select and Mask” option to open the properties page.
Here it is easy to notice the missed areas on the image. All I have to do is to use the Refine Edge brush tool and feather the edges at the highest opacity. This is how I achieve the perfect selection of my subject in my images.
Once that is done I create a duplicate layer to work on the background. I inverse the selection and simply brush the background with a green brush at 50% opacity at 0 hardness. Just by doing this we will achieve 90% of our final image.
Then comes the next round of color correction using Color Balance. Here, I can change the tone of the image to warmer or cooler simply by sliding the shadows and highlights towards red or blue. I usually don’t play with the magentas and cyans since that sometimes introduces inaccurate tones in the image .
Next, I work on the Brightness and Contrast palettes, which I increase by 10 pts and reduce by 5 pts, respectively.
Next, I add 13 pts of Vibrance to give that extra pop my images have.
Once I know my image is ready, I resize my file for posting to social media with 1600px on the longer side.
Next up is image sharpening. I always use Photoshops inbuilt sharpening tool which give me very good results.
Traditionally, I always keep the radius at 1 and amount not more than 110 in most images and this is the same setting I have used here. Since these images are used primarily for the web, I do not over sharpen them.
My image is almost ready and all that is left now is to save it in 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
The Yellow-Throated Toucans use their large colorful bills for feeding, thermal regulation, and defense. With an eight-inch bill and a wingspan of eight to ten inches, these are the largest toucans in the world. Though their beaks are large it is light and serrated to help them pick fruits and their feather-like tongue eases swallowing. They are zygodactyls which means they have two toes pointed forward and two toes pointed backward. They use their legs to hop between branches and are not great at flying.
