Black Shouldered Kite with lunch

[Christopher C.M. Cooke]

Captured at the Edithvale Wetlands melbourne, on the 15.01/09 using canon EOS-1D MK. III 1/4000sec, 300mm F4 at f 7.1, ISO 640, Pattern metering, 0 stepfile:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Chris/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.jpg

[Marc Mol]

Well captured image! A 3:2 crop would be better + some NR also. Was this a large crop?

Cheers
Marc

[Christopher C.M. Cooke]

Well captured image! A 3:2 crop would be better + some NR also. Was this a large crop?

Yes 66% crop and no NR was applied.

[Robert Amoruso]

Nice work - good wing position. Only think better is if the wing was further up to eliminate the tip shadow. The position of the mouse is great though.

I did a few corrections for you to consider in the repost.

I sharpened the image once using Unsharp Mask at 175/0.3/0. I selected the eye and socket and did a curves adjustment to lighten it. I then did a shadows/highlights adjustment to lighten up the wing shadow. I also selected the BG using the magic wand and did a Gaussian blur on it around 2 pixels but more would have been OK to get rid of the noise. This was in PSCS3.

Working from the original, you will get better results.

[Christopher C.M. Cooke]

Thanks a million Robert some very useful info there and I shall return to the original RAW and try again, love the result of your work on it.

I have a few shots of it with the wing further up but I find that it unbalances the photo, I actually prefer the shots of it with the wings down with the tips up which I will post later.

Chris