Long & the short of it is I'm not speaking to you!

[Steve Uffman]

Vision for photo: Birds sometimes mimic human behavior. I saw humor in this fairly odd couple of juveniles on DryBread Island off the coast of Louisiana...reminded me of a couple of spoiled children turning their back and not speaking to each other (which they probably learned from THEIR parents):S3:

Although in truth the juveniles probably were cooperatively looking out for avian predators which were bountiful with the recent spate of hatchings)

Shot just after sunrise from my boat when taking several AP photojournalists to the island where a reported bird kill due to the oil spill had taken place. This rookery had tens of thousands of birds and chicks. We observed no abnormal mortality beyond what is customary in nature on a crowded rookery with many different species of birds present. Some credit must be given to the workers that had heavily placed protection booms around most key rookeries. The island also had a barge with significant oil removal equipment on standby

Canon 7d 100-400mm @ 340mm @ 5.6 @ 1/340s @ ISO 400 handheld on lee side of island with a 10 knot breeze

[Dave Leroy]

Thanks for sharing the story about the roohery and effects of the oil spill. That is good news. I imagine we will be getting more news, good and bad, as the wintering birds start to return to the summer nesting sites in the months to come.

An interesting photo and I like the included habitat.

A couple suggestions would be to remove the one oof grass stalk in front of the young bird and perhaps the photo could be a bit brighter.

Thanks for sharing and looking forward to more.

Dave

[Steve Uffman]

thanks Dave for taking the time to critique. I will work to remove the grass stalk. and I played with brightness. I will post another version once done. One thing I did with the series of photos I took was educate folks on what was going on in the gulf. part of that was to give folks a feeling of what the world looks like in the gulf at sunrise.

Interesting the gallery of photographs I took and emailed to a few folks went viral, being viewed over 10000 times in two weeks. I recieved comments about from Canada, Germany, Costa Rica and more. Really quite interesting what the Internet can do.

[Paul Guris]

Agree on the brightness. I was wondering if a little selecting brightening of the gull's head would help make it stand out from the grass a little more.

BTW, I think your birds are a Tricolored Heron and a Laughing Gull.

[Steve Uffman]

Thanks Paul, I think that is a good suggestion and the selective brightening of an area is something I have just learned this week as I go thru the learning process of all you can do with the post processing tools...

Certainly the forum is helping me better discern what areas to work on.


again thanks for the help

[Julie Kenward]

steve, what a neat image. The way the sun sets off that top area of grass is beautiful! It does leave you with a rather dark (underexposed) middle and foreground, though. Depending on how far away you were a bit of fill flash in the field might have helped this a bit.

In pp, I did a shadow/highlights adjustment and cloned out some of the brighter more blurred areas of the FG grasses by cloning from different areas of the image. I then cropped some from the right to get the birds more into the ROT's positions.

Just some thoughts for you to consider...

[Steve Uffman]

wonderful...much improved...I knew how to lighten the image but had no clue how to deal with the cloning and such.....really do appreciate the input

[Steve Uffman]

and I forgot to mention we were in my boat and were careful we did not get too close to the birds that we thought had been stressed enough with all the commotion of the oil spill clean up....

I actually practiced with fill flash today and yes it would have been nice...although I not yet convinced that I want to take all that out into the gulf unless my mission is photography....

[Julie Kenward]

Steve, when cloning something as random as this grass you can pretty much choose anything and it will work. I simply moved down the image from the OOF areas, put the clone tool at the same height as the part I wanted to get rid of and cloned over it. You just want to watch when you do big areas that you pull clones from different places so it doesn't give you a repeating pattern.