Royal Tern shake-off at Ft. DeSoto

[Jerry Barrack]

Sony a9 body with Sony FE 200-600mm F5.6-6.3 lens with 1.4x at 526mm.ISO 1600, F11, at 1/3200 sec., exp in manual mode using zebras. Focus area limit-Wide, mounted on Flex shooter mini on Indoor 304L tripod. Taken at Ft. DeSoto park 3/19/20 at 8:59 am.Processed in C1-12 and Photoshop CS5

Since this is my first post after looking at this blog for many years I hope everyone will be kind and generous (but honest)! I was stimulated to make the big leap when I saw Arash Hazeghi's post of the Tern on 8/19/20. While my shot doesn't have the perfect parallel alignment, it has the horizon to prove the bird was not flipped. Do you feel this is a negative or a positive? I switched from Canon last November and am totally blown away with the incredibly fast and accurate focusing.

[arash_hazeghi]

action looks great, a bit of shadow but not a big deal. I am ok with the ocean line. The image does look soft and lacking in details a bit as posted and too small on my screen , was it a big crop or maybe processing issues?

TFS

[Jerry Barrack]

Thank you for your critique. Being new to this, I was not sure how to get the image down to 600kb. I think I really messed it up. My original JPG image from the tif file was 12.7MB and the crop was not too large. It looked quite sharp when I was processing it in C1 and Photoshop. I would appreciate any hints on how to reduce the size to 600kb.
Thanks again for your review.

[arash_hazeghi]

the best way to compress the images for this site is to use "save for web" feature in PS

[Jerry Barrack]

Thank you. I'll try that with my next image.

[John Mack]

The action of the bird shaking off is nice. Like all those water drops. I don't mind the background.

[Jerry Barrack]

Thanks, I appreciate your comments