Taken at the local trail here in Gainesville, FL. I'm awaiting the Sandhill cranes, but until then I'll be practicing my in-flight photography with the great blue. Lovely subject, in my opinion. Their slow flight makes it good to practice in flight photography, especially figuring out how much to lead the bird when panning.
This one is shot with a 2x teleconverter on the 500 f/4. When I used it on the Nikon D300s, i wouldn't have dreamed of AF for non-static subjects. But on the D800, it does a pretty good job.
Shooting Specs:
Nikon D800 | 500 f/4 VR + 2x
1000 mm | 1/1000" | f/9 | ISO 640
Auto ISO set to min shutter speed of 1/1000" (I was shooting stills when this guy came in and didn't have time to switch the setting - or at least didn't think about it at the time). Really love the new Auto-ISO feature, accessible with only a press of a button and a turn of a dial :)
Processing:
- The image was a bit underexposed (my fault for not switching fast enough - working on it!), so there was a bit of exposure and fill light added in the raw conversion (LR4).
- In photoshop, I added a bit of room to the right and took a bit off from the left using content aware fill. Used the clone brush tool to clean up some minor defects in the fill.
- Selective contrast (curves), detail enhancer (Nik), and eye lightening (dodge layer) were also done.
- Cropped to "cinema" 16:9 aspect ratio, downsized to 1024 px wide and sharpened for web.
As always: critiques, comments, suggestions, ... they are all welcomed and appreciated!
Miguel I have taken the liberty of modifying the image, I used curves to lower the central point and also the highlights what do you think? I reckon if you go back to the raw file and lower the brightest parts and close the histogram in from the left just a little you would probably be about there.