Found in most of North America, the Great Blue Heron is the larg

Great Blue Heron. Nikon D810 with the Nikkor 200-500mm ED VR

You are not the judge of how good your art is.

I made two photos from this scene, virtually identical compositions with the bird in different positions on the dead tree limb.

It’s funny sometimes, seeing how an image does. Ones estimate of the quality of the shot is not always what you think it is. While I liked the simplicity of the composition, I saw it as being a nice but not fantastic image, so I sent the two similar images to my stock catalogs. This photo (and the sister photo)  as it turns out, are quite popular as stock images.

Here’s the sister image.

Great Blue Heron

The lesson I got from these two photos is, you are not the judge of how good your art is.

On a side note, and this may be a subject for a future article on color management. The photos I posted here are JPG files using the RGB color space. The originals are RAW files, with a PRO Photo RGB color space. I keep my computer monitors color calibrated and they match very closely on my computer, but when converted from the PRO Photo color space to an sRGB color space, it alters the colors slightly. The PRO Photo RGB color space produces a much wider gamut of colors than the sRGB color space, so when the gamut is compressed to the sRGB color space, the background hue shifts slightly. On the original images, the background is more of a light blue and these web images have changed , with a slight magenta tilt. I don’t know that I mind the color shift but it is noticeably different on my computer monitors. JPG files can not accurately represent a full range of colors, there simply isn’t enough room in the sRGB gamut to accommodate the full range of color that is available in larger gamut profiles. A reality of Internet quality vs actual image quality of file compression using relative or perceptual color-metric conversions is that it will always have small differences. As a matter of fact, people viewing these images on their computer or mobile devices will see a slightly different background color as well as compared to what I see on my system when editing the images.

With all the advancements in digital cameras over the years, display technology and Internet color accuracy seems to be stuck in the year 1992 as far as color accuracy and gamut range are concerned. 8 bit JPG with 16.8 million colors is the lowest common denominator image format for good color and technologically, the camera and display industry can’t seem to move out of the bottom of the barrel with this. Better marketing doesn’t make for better image quality. Even with the better monitor technology available today, converting down to sRGB JPG images strips that better color out of the image and converts it to fewer colors for smaller file sizes. Hopefully, at some point down the road, we’ll move out of the 8 bit color model and find a new and better color standard.