Least Tern Chick vs. Black Skimmer Chick

[Robert vanMierop]

The smaller bird started it, but it lasted less than three seconds...no harm done. Anastasia State Park, St. Augustine, FL. In terms of overall numbers and various species, this was our best nesting season in at least five years. Nikon D7200, 200-500VR at 500mm, 1/3200, f/6.3, iso 640, handheld.

[Nikhil Patwardhan]

Interesting moment, nice pose from both birds and a well balanced composition but the image quality is lacking for me, lots of blotches/grain all over, highlights are blown and also there are couple of straight line artifacts -- lower right bottom and center bottom.

[Arthur Morris]

An amazing interaction. And a wonderful low perspective. But there is lots of noise. Please post a JPEG that represents the full frame original; this looks like a very large crop ...

with love, artie

[gail bisson]

Love, love the interaction here but IQ is not great. Is this a big crop?
Gail

[Bill Dix]

IQ noted, but this is really an amazing capture. Something I've never witnessed, or seen posted. Thanks for sharing it.

[Daniel Cadieux]

If this is a huge crop I can understand the reduced IQ. If not that big of a crop, some processing TLC would elevate this many points higher and would be worth it as the interaction and subject matter is hard to beat.

[Robert vanMierop]

Yeah, it is a significant crop. But it's also some behavior that I doubt I'll ever see again. I've had several people ask me about our nesting colonies this year and I was glad to report it was a very good year. Absent any habitat destroying weather, next year should be just fine.

[Daniel Cadieux]

It certainly was a unique behaviour you saw!! Pretty cool.

[Isaac Grant]

To die for action here. A completely unique frame so my hat is off to you, way off! As for the image quality, I think with some better processing you have a chance to have a better final product. Just as an idea of what can be done I did the following. Keep in mind that all of this is best done on the raw and that when you have a large crop that you will introduce lots of noise and grain to your shot. I could have probably worked the yellows more and left more in the background and reduced the birds less but didn't bother, mostly wanted to work on the grain and reduce the yellow cast. I reduced the yellows in hue saturation by 50%, I ran a detail extractor/tonal contrast/pro contrast layer at low opacity using the NIK plugins to bring a bit more detail out on the birds, I ran noise reduction on the background and bird separately, and smart sharpened at .3 and 75%. My advice would be to fix the yellow cast and highlight during your RAW conversion. Then once you import to photoshop to crop less so that you do not take as much of a hit on image quality. The action will still be great and unique and does not require such a close up to have an impact. Then to carefully run noise reduction on the bird and background. A smaller crop and properly exposed converted file should greatly decrease the noise in your shot which will result in better image quality. Let me know if you have any questions.

[Arthur Morris]

Excellent work by Isaac above (though I would not have reduced the YELLOW so much). Thanks you Mr Grant.

with love, artie

ps: Bobby, feel free to send me the RAW file via a large file transfer service (to samandmayasgrandpa@att.net).