Preparing for lift-off

[Aditya Sridhar]

Processed in Capture 1 and NR applied in Photoshop. I removed a second catch light in the eye but no other cloning was done.

Camera - Nikon D850
Focal Length - 700mm
Aperture - f/11
Shutter Speed - 1/4000s
ISO - 4000
Handheld
Manual, Auto ISO
Crop - 80-85% of full-frame

All CC and comments are appreciated :bg3:

[John Mack]

Light looks nice. Neat how the bird is balanced on top of that little hump. Nice background.

[dankearl]

This one has a better pose and comp....
maybe add a bit of blacks to the bird.

[Dorian Anderson]

Great pose, and I love that watery background. Lighting in perfect. The setting looks a lot like the shots I used to get in LA County when I lived in SoCal.

Technically, why f/11 in bright sunlight? You probably gave up 2 stops of noise without gaining much DOF across the subject. I think the nice detail you have would be even crisper had you been at f/5.6.

[Aditya Sridhar]

Thanks a lot everyone!

Dorian - I was using the 500PF with the 1.4x TC so I had a max aperture of f/8. The bird was quite close so I stopped down for DOF. It didn't make a huge difference, but the reason I experimented with stopping down was actually to get more definition in the background. I wanted more structure to the waves and although I didn't quite achieve what I was going for, the results seemed slightly better than the wide open frames. I also managed to get more of the bird and the rocks in focus so that's a plus. There was no difference in sharpness between the f/8 and f/11 shots from what I can tell. You're right though in that the difference in noise probably outweighs the minor increase in DOF. I probably experimented at the worst possible time :t3