Macaws and more

Hello all. I have been fairly quiet of late, having been on my hols (). Headed off to the warmer climes of the caribbean, and in fairness mostly just took snaps on my weenie optio; but did get some chances to use the K5 and these were taken at a small wildlife park called Ardastral Zoo and Gardens in New Providence, Bahamas. It was a small but pretty well formed place. Lots of bird life and not too many bars or cages, so here's a handful, all taken with my ancient and battered sigma 70-300 lens which I resurrected for the trip. It was exceptionally hot and the bright sunshine made life a little difficult owing to the bright lit areas and strong shadows:

1. Macaw says hello



2. Optimistic Meerkat



3. Dragon pauses for a breather



4. Looks like the terrapins are in a huff



5. One of the proud 'stars' of the zoo... a noble(ish) looking caribbean Flamingo



6. Showing off



7. Great Green Macaw doing his ablutions



8. Close up



9. Just hangin'...



I hope you like these; any C&C welcome as ever. As usual there are more (and a growing number!) on my flickr.

Cheers all

Real nice sharp shots, Mat. Good job!

Regards,

Jeeess

I like them all and the terrapins is my favourite

I like the black background in contrast to brightly coloured birds in shots 1,6 and 7, it works really well. Would you be willing to tell how you achieved that?.

I also like the meerkat

Mark

Thanks everyone for the encouraging comments.

Mark - I generally black out the backgrounds where I want to (if I can't manage it 'in camera using flash etc.) with the 'burn' tool in photoshop elements. There are probably a number of ways to achieve the same end but the burn tool is what I find works for me. It is located with the 'dodge' and 'sponge' tools, and once selected you have the ability to decide what size and shape of 'brush' to use to paint the burn (i.e. darkening) into the picture, and also whether to use a hard edged brush or a soft edged. I generally find that using a big brush with a high proportion of burn (50-100%) is very good for blacking out big chunks of area; once I get close to the edges with the section I want to leave un-burned, then I use a smaller soft-edged brush with a burn of about 10% and do a number of sweeps to gradually black out the background leaving the main subject untouched and (hopefully) not leaving an artificial edge between the subject and the black background.

I also sometimes use the vignette tool to darken corners in a convenient way ( for instance pic 7 here has a corner vignette whereas pic 1 does not). I rather like B/W pics where there is just a single subject in a mostly black frame (like the Meerkat here) and a combination of vignetting and burning can achieve this pretty quickly

Hope that helps

Cheers