birds in blue

I’m not sure, that I will work any more on this one, but I would like to here your thoughs. Especially if you can give solutions to any critiques you might have.

It’s done in blender with the exception of the ruffled feathers around the edges of the bird.

Thx.


Certainly the first thing that I would urge you to reconsider is the lighting … including the need for rim-lighting of the bird to help separate it from the background against which it otherwise blends in (losing much of the 3D-illusion in the process).

There is also the consideration of cropping. Take a few pieces of dark paper and place them around the edges of the picture as you have it now, and start pushing them toward the middle to enclose a smaller-and-smaller square or rectangle … which can of course be positioned anywhere. Start to crop the picture in this way, and as you do so, try to crop aggressively. If the material does not clearly push the intended subject-matter of the picture forward, out it goes. Also consider the “rule of thirds,” taking care to put the pigeon (especially) on such a point.

I’m going to guess that you probably put this picture together using some amount of compositing – which is a good approach – and this might be why some of the background objects unexpectedly appear to be translucent.

Certainly the first thing that I would urge you to reconsider is the lighting … including the need for rim-lighting of the bird to help separate it from the background against which it otherwise blends in (losing much of the 3D-illusion in the process).

There is also the consideration of cropping. Take a few pieces of dark paper and place them around the edges of the picture as you have it now, and start pushing them toward the middle to enclose a smaller-and-smaller square or rectangle … which can of course be positioned anywhere. Start to crop the picture in this way, and as you do so, try to crop aggressively. If the material does not clearly push the intended subject-matter of the picture forward, out it goes. Also consider the “rule of thirds,” taking care to put the pigeon (especially) on such a point.

I’m going to guess that you probably put this picture together using some amount of compositing – which is a good approach – and this might be why some of the background objects unexpectedly appear to be translucent. The object at “nine-o’-clock,” directly to the left of the bird, appears to be ghostly in-front-of the longer horizontal indentation in the wall.

Compositing is an ideal approach to use in a shot like this. Not only is it uncomplicated back-to-front, but “the pigeon and the bird-bath are where the action is,” and if you’re going to be re-rendering and/or otherwise tweaking anything to get it just right, it’s probably going to be one of those two things.

Ansel Adams once said that “a picture is captured in the camera, but it’s made in the darkroom,” and he was right. (The original negatives of many of his most-famous prints … I’ve held copies of some of them in my own hands … don’t look like the prints.) Don’t be ashamed to use compositing-based “darkroom tricks,” such as very-slightly “dodging” on-and-around the bird just to make it a little lighter, maybe a little more saturated color, and so on … thus to make the finished composition “better” without per se drawing the viewer’s eye to notice exactly why. Especially in a shot like this, there really are two steps: (1) “photographing” (rendering…), and (2) “the darkroom” (post-production).