This week's "60 Minutes" (a US TV program with coverage of news and human interest stories) had a segment described the Photo Ark Project - https://www.joelsartore.com/gallery/the-photo-ark/ - of a photographer trying to photograph all species, especially those that may be extinct by the end of this century. It's an amazing project and his photos are just gorgeous portraits. I went through my archive to find an animal photo to work on. This pelican pair is from my sailing trip last October. The sky, though, is from a telephoto image of Chicago clouds on a sunny day. Combined in Luminar 4, then processed in LR.
Beautiful! Joel's work on the Photo Ark is really amazing. I believe that he began this project when he was kind of relegated to home, because his wife had breast cancer and he needed to care for the kids. I really love how he made creative "lemonade" to lift up a vital issue.
Taffy, your processing, as always, is remarkable! Thanks for mentioning the Photo Ark Project. He’s also an amazing photographer with an equally amazing mission.
@olivetreeann Ooops...they were actually flying along the shore, but the sky was a solid blue and it wasn't that interesting. I added the Chicago sky with clouds.
@taffy I guess I meant you'd totally believe this was the actual sky and not a composite- the two pictures blend well together when the lighting could have made it obvious that they were different pictures.
@olivetreeann Oh, thank you! It's the Luminar 4 program. It makes it so easy to bring in a different sky. I'm guessing it can be used for crazier things, but I'm finding it helpful to draw on real skies but perhaps from different days, so it still looks natural.
@maggiemae Pelicans are really fast -- they were challenging to capture with the long lens unless the light was really bright and I could use a shutter speed of over 2000.
This is lovely and it’s for sure getting a Fav but two thoughts...I think it would be more realistic if you blurred the sky a bit. It’s almost more sharp than the pelicans. Also the edges of the pelicans are a bit abrupt. I find it really hard to have a little softness in them but not lose the good detail
@jgpittenger Thanks -- very helpful especially about the sky being sharper than the one pelican especially. I didn't even think about that when combining.
