Dingle Ireland Gull

[Hazel Grant]

Traveling in Ieland now. Saw this gull posing, so had to take a shot. Initially a bit underexposed but I think the post work in PS cleaned it up. I cropped it in quite close. Too close? Selective color work and selective sharpening around the eyes and beak.

1/20, f36, aperture priority, iSO 100, 95 mmm

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the head turn and soft light. It is too close since the foot is clipped. The image looks relatively soft on my monitor and I wish the rock behind the bird were not there.

[Nancy A Elwood]

Hazel that is quite a slow shutter speed. I suspect that is motion blur with this softness. What lens were you using? Also why f/36? Probably f/8 would of been plenty. Maybe have the subject to the right or left of the scene so as to not crop so close and cut off the legs. seascapes can be nice with birds included.

Cheers
Nancy

[Doug Brown]

Hi Hazel! I'd love to visit Ireland someday. The crop is a bit tight; you cropped the near foot out of the frame. What you needed here was more shutter speed as there is quite a bit of motion blur. I agree with Nancy's suggestion that f/8 would have been more than enough.

[John Chardine]

You have a nice pose and head angle but as mentioned your techs were working against you. First ISO 400 works pretty well on all camera bodies these days and is a great compromise between speed and noise. I would recommend trying this setting. You have plenty of light to play with here and at ISO 400 you could have exposed at about 1/1600s at f8-f11 by my calculations. This would have worked well for you. Also the lack of contrast and greenish hue can both be easily addressed in Ps. The repost here simply uses Curves to up the contrast. I then boosted the overall saturation a bit, lightened the eye and darkened the pupil, lightened the body of bird and gave the whole image a round of sharpening. Note that the image is still soft, which tells you that sharpening in post-precessing isn't all-powerful.

Regarding the crop, more room around the bird would be optimal, especially below where the foot currently cut (maybe that's what it was like in camera?).

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

You have a nice bird here Hazel but the techs let it down a little. John made a nice improvement with a little tinkering. Most important to always choose as fast a shutter speed as possible. It helps you freeze the image. Especially when hand holding. You should try and remember the 1/Focal Length rule for your shutter speed to use. That being say if you use a 300mm lens, the minimum shutter speed should be 1/300th or next one up or down from that (1/350th or 1/250th if you work in exposure intervals of 1/3). Now if you have a crop sensor camera like the Canon 50D or Nikon D80 you should work out a faster shutter speed due to the cropping effect of the camera body. In both cases, you could almost double the mimimum shutter speed.

50D has a 1.6x crop factor so 300mm x 1.6 = 480mm field of view equivalent so shutter speed should be at least 1/500th.

D80 has a 1.5x crop factor so 300mm x 1.5 = 450mm FOV eq. so 1/500th again.

Just remember that with faster shutter speeds you need to open up aperture so depth of field will reduce. However, that is where carefully focusing on a critical feature of the bird (usually the head/eyes) will result in a good image.

Hope it is helpful and keep it up!
Thanks for sharing. :)

[Hazel Grant]

Thanks everyone. I really can't give a good reason for the f stop number. Just wasn't thinking right in the rush to capture, I guess. I'll certainly pay more attention. I have a Nikon D40x. There are lots and lots of gulls around here (and other birds,) so I'll work on that speed/aperture ratio more and see what happens. Thanks!!!!