Sweeping the mudflats

[wendell westfall]

D90 70-200VR 1/2500 F6.3 ISO400 -2/3EV monopod

I caught this avocet today with its beak almost completely buried in the mud. Surely they can't find much food in such a place. They work at it constantly. The image is pretty heavily cropped, then adjusted minimally. How does it look?

Wendell

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Wendell,

Greetings. I like the feeding pose... good detail and eye contact. The water color seems a bit warm for my taste (a B channel curve adjustment in LAB would work here) and a little more room on the bottom would be my preference. Good show!

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Chris Ober]

Looks pretty good to me. There's a surprising amount of tasty morsels for them in the muck. Maybe run some noise reduction on the background?

[Kerry Perkins]

Wendell, very nice! One of your best that I've seen. Great job on the whites, super detail, and nice background. I love the angularity of the feeding pose here and you got a nice head angle. I agree with a tad more room on the bottom, but the composition is quite nice. Nice work to get the pleasant low shooting angle. Well done! You get a smiley... :bg3:

[denise ippolito]

Wendell, Awesome job!! I love the pose and the sharp details, nice work with the exposure-congrats!:S3: Good suggestions above.

[wendell westfall]

Thanks to all for looking and commenting! Very helpful to me . . .

[John Chardine]

Beautiful Wendell. I love the detail in the neck feathers. Great action. I see some noise in the BG which can easily be removed. An added bonus of this is that the jpeg you post can be compressed less and still come in under the BPN limit. If you look at the circular ripple around the right foot you can see the image needs a little CCW rotation. I wish avocets were more common in the east!

[gail bisson]

I have never seen this bird in real life. On my list... I really like the picture. I like the diagonal line the body creates and I like the action of feeding. Very nice color BG and agree about the noise. A beautiful shot
Gail

[wendell westfall]

John and Gail, I seem often to have a problem seeing noise. Do you enlarge an image to detect it, or is it obvious to you at its posted size?

The Avocets here (Orange County's San Joaquin Marsh) are in the midst of their breeding season. Soon I will be photographing the young ones -- they are always fun to watch.

[John Chardine]

Wendell- The noise in this beautiful image is fairly fine-grained. I can see it in the image as posted (I don't enlarge), but if you scroll the image up and down on your monitor, you can discern the noise from any texture or dust that may be on the surface of your monitor.

[William Malacarne]

John

Correct me if I am wrong but sometime ago it was posted here that people were to make critiques on the size images were posted and not to be enlarged.

Bill

[John Chardine]

Bill- I vaguely remember a thread that went in that direction. As far as I'm concerned, whatever tools are necessary to critically assess an image can and should be used. If enlarging an image posted to BPN to something greater than 100% helps, then go for it. In my opinion it doesn't help because of the resultant pixelation, and therefore I see no need to enlarge.

[wendell westfall]

John -- 'preciate your explanation. I simply must look closer (with these old, old eyes).