Ring-Billed Gull Water Landing

[Edward Arthur]

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3674/13177245725_afa5cdaf9d_b.jpg

I'm new to the forum (see my introduction post) and only recently attempted capturing birds-in-flight. It's an extra special challenge with the manual focus lenses I like to use. I'm usually more at ease sneaking up on immobile objects like flowers, sunsets and my sleeping bulldog. :)

This one shot yesterday at the local pond. Missed focus on the eye a smidge -- oh, well. Appreciate any C&C.

Technical specs:
Canon 6D
Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar 80-200mm f/4 + Zeiss Mutar 2x teleconverter
400mm @ f/5.6 1/1000 ISO 500
Handheld on a clear bright day at 3:30pm
A little pp in LR 5 for highlights/shadows and light crop for compo

[arash_hazeghi]

you had some nice light, I like the wing positions too but this one has a couple of major issues : poor image quality (oversharepened, lacks of feather detail and lots of noise/artifacts as a result of too much sharpening plus blown highlights) The bird had passed you a bit, a few moments earlier would have been ideal.

It will be a disappointing experience trying to shoot flight with a manual focus lens... your files will come out soft and IQ will be quite poor.


TFS

[Edward Arthur]

Thanks for the input. I do see what you mean, good points. A little better handling of pp could "save" some of it, the rest is in execution.

I re-posted the image on Flickr, but then blew up the link above. So not able to edit that now. Sorry.