Southern Ground Hornbill - After
April 7, 2022 - 10:08 am

If you are going to print an image in a large format it needs to resonate with the viewer. It's even more important with a large image to draw the viewer into the picture. It needs depth as well as visual appeal.

We encountered this female Southern Ground Hornbill on a trip to the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania in 2018. Hornbills are large, aggressive hunters that feed on lizards, snakes, insects, and when they can get them, baby birds. You can tell it’s a female hornbill by the blue patch under her bill. She was being aggressively dive-bombed by a smaller Wattled Lapwing. Wattled Lapwings nest on the ground, and the young birds are extremely vulnerable to attack. The lapwing was doing her absolute best to pester the hornbill into giving up. Which in fact, she did.

I liked the original image of the hornbill, but there was not as much separation from the background as I would have liked. Rather than masking and blurring the background in Photoshop, I decided to overpaint the bird, and put her on an entirely created background.

I wanted to be close to realistic, but clearly a created image. I was inspired by one of my favorite paintings in the National Gallery of Art, Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade. My image may not be ready for the National Gallery, but it has an honored place on my living room wall.

I took the original image with a Canon EOS 7D Mark II with a Canon 100 - 400mm EF f/4.5-5.6 L IS II USM lens. The exposure settings were 1/500 sec at f/6.3, ISO 500, 400 mm.