birding
Welcome to /c/birding, a community for people who like birds, birdwatching and birding in general! Feel free to post your birding photos or just photos of birds you found in general, but please follow the rules as outlined below.
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This should go without saying, but please be nice to one another. No petty insults, no bigotry, no harassment, hate speech,nothing of that sort! Depending on the severity, you'll either only get your comment removed and a warning or your comment will be removed and you will be banned from /c/birding.
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This is a community for posting content of birds, nothing else. Please keep the posts related to birding or birds in general.
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When posting photos or videos that you did not take, please always credit the original photographer! Link to the original post on social media as well, if there is one.
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Absolutely no AI-generated content is allowed! I know it has become quite difficult to tell whether or not something is AI-generated or not, but please make sure that whatever you post is not AI-generated. If it is, your post will be removed. If you continously post AI-generated content, you'll be banned from /c/birding (but it's obviously okay if you post AI-generated stuff once or twice without knowing you did so).
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Please provide rough information location, if possible. This is a more loosely-enforced rule, especially because it is sometimes not possible to provide a location. But if you post a photo you took yourself, please provide a rough location and date of the sighting.
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I don't like heavy cropping in post. I try and compose the framing I want, but in this instance, the lens just wasn't up to it. So, we get lots of water lettuce :)
I split my subjects into wildlife and others: for the "Others", Landscape, say, its perfectly correct to want to take the photo and "Fill the frame", only cropping if you need to straighten the shot or there's an actively irritating out of focus thing at one edge. You move, select the right lens, zoom, etc. to achieve that, before you press the shutter.
With wildlife, I take what I can, and fully expect to crop, even down to a tenth of the area of the original shot. That's because I don't have the luxury to get closer or change lens, or indeed do much to play with camera settings - if I do, the bird or animal will likely flee (or just move because it wants to). My only acknowledgement of "Fill the frame" is that after taking the best shot I can at the point of first spotting the subject, I will then try and get closer, just in case I get lucky.
But, it's your photo and so your choice - if it doesn't satisfy you, it's a failure, regardless of the opinion of others.
That's how I used to shoot wildlife photography, but post processing is my least favourite part of photograph and I don't want to spend more time there than I have to. If I start cropping the good photos, then I start cropping the average photos too, and then I'm spending more time doing the part I don't like than the parts I do.
So I generally don't do anything more than simple crops to level, or remove a distracting feature right on the border.
I can imagine going off post-processing, especially if you start believing you've got to twiddle every switch, move every slider, and correct every portion of the picture separately (the sort of thing portrait photographers get up to with Photoshop, etc.). Far too easy to get obsessional about it, and lose the point and the fun.
But for me, I limit it to cropping to a balanced subject/background, and get the whole-picture lighting correct (living in the UK, and often taking shots in poor weather or woodland means the light is rarely right) is my usual limit - though I do play with the histogram tool: tweaking the midpoint can do great things for "washed out" shots. I rarely even touch colour balance. I'm also just using Canon's DPP4 for this, so free but quite effective. Given just those, I find it feels much more like an opportunity to review and reflect on what I've taken than a burden, and in some cases, e.g. rescue a boring shadow into visible plumage.