Pelican Landing

[Steve Wheeler]

Taken this morning at White Rock Lake... Overcast and foggy early. One of the better landing images I think. I'm going to miss these guys terribly when they head north again.

Your thoughts and feedback are always welcome!

Steve

40D & 100-400 @ 400mm, ISO 500, f5.6 @ 1/2500

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Nice landing pose captured. I like the the stretched wings and would sharpen the bird a bit more and wish for better separation between the bird's left wing and the land.

[Jody Melanson]

Agree with Axel. Especially about sharpening...

[Steve Wheeler]

Better?

Went back into Lightroom... This as much sharpening as I can apply without getting a halo.

Thank you guys for your comments!

Steve

[Jody Melanson]

Much better. Don't you think?

[Steve Wheeler]

Yes.... I tend to use the sharpen controls very sparingly... Sometimes apparently too much so.

Thanks again Jody....

Your snowy owls are gorgeous!

Steve

[Fabs Forns]

Repost is much better, Steve, great pose you got!

[Leroy Laverman]

Steve - are you using the masking option in lightroom when you sharpen? Hold down the alt key and bring the slider up to 80-90% to see what happens. This applies an edge mask to the sharpening so that you don't unintentionally bring up noise. Better yet is to do this in photoshop then you can change the blending to allow sharpening to occur in the midtone regions only. This allows you to sharpen more heavily without getting halos. Check out Bruce Fraser's "Real World - Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop CS2" for a much more in depth discussion of this. I use an action for this based on his guidelines and it works great and doesn't take much time.

Good capture of the pelican. You might consider getting rid of the background as it doesn't add much and distracts from the bird. Just some food for thought.

[Steve Wheeler]

Thank you Fabs!

Leroy...

"Hold down the alt key and bring the slider up to 80-90% to see what happens. This applies an edge mask to the sharpening so that you don't unintentionally bring up noise."

I had not been doing this... Thank you as always for the tips! You are always willing to help and I appreciate that!

This repost uses your suggestion. I wanted to go ahead and load it here so I could compare apples to apples as the image always seems to look different to me here than in LR.

Steve

[Axel Hildebrandt]

The second repost looks really good on my monitor.

[Steve Wheeler]

Thanks Axel.... It looks better to me too although the differences are subtle. Guess I'm still trying to develop an eye for these things.

Thank you for commenting!

Steve