I like the composition and the bird against the environment. The gull really pops. Could you please tell me whether this is a big crop or whether you ran noise reduction on the bird b/c I am not seeing as many details in the gull as I would like and there is some halo around parts of the bird.
Marina....yes it is probably cropped about 50 %.....because the D-800 is a 36 mp camera i thought I could get away with that.......I also ran noise reduction...perhaps too much! Thanks fro looking!
Hi Bob. Instead of trying to figure out percentages, it is much more useful to deal in megapixels. If you use ACR the MP of the image/cropped image is shown bottom center. I've been shooting with 24 MP, and had a tendancy to crop too much as well, and crop percentages are notoriously hard to judge. In my experience down to 12 MP is a good target size, but lower and especially below 5 MP causes problems, even when downsized for the web.
NR to the background is perfectly fine, but NR to the subject is much more problematic, and damages feather and other detail significantly. It is very important you do not underexpose your subject (ETTR best if possible), for noise occurs mainly in the darker parts of an image. It is also better to selectively appply NR, if you need it, only to the parts that need it. With the color range command (in CS) you can pick shadows, essentially the darker parts of an image, and then apply NR to that selection.
It is a ring-billed gull. regards~Bill
Based upon what you have told me, I think the problem lays with too much noise reduction on your subject. On a white subject you such as in this case, you probably did not need any noise reduction at all. Maybe just on the background.
Ringed beak Gull In Flight
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