Sandwich Tern stooping

[shane shacaluga]

After a huge storm a few days ago the marine birds have come closer to shore so I decided to go for an outing in my boat and see what I could find

We were quite successful on the outing and I will be posting a few shots I took.

Here is one I thought was quite good trying out my 300f4 with no TC to as planning to finally buy a 500f4 soon and wanted to see the difference in sharpness

There was a pair of sandwich terns hunting close to the rocks and each time they pulled a fish they were mobbed by the local juvenile yellow legged gulls.

D800e
300mm @ f4
1/4000
ISO 200

Hand held with usual PP techniques. I did not blow the whites but reduced exposure slightly in ACR to bring the RGB below 235
Selective sharpening on the bird and reduced the blue saturation slightly as well. Slight tone down of BG

Used a vertical crop to show some of the environment where this tern was hunting.

Thoughts and critics welcome

Happy new year to you all ;)

[arash_hazeghi]

I like the diving pose and the BG that shows the rocks too and the ocean. but the bird isn't showing much detail, it seems that it was too small in the frame.

TFS

[Daniel Cadieux]

Ditto Arash's critique. Looks like a neat spot though!

Happy New Year to you as well....

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks for the comments guys.

In the raw file, eventhough the bird is smallish in the frame , there seems to be enough detail. Do you think the sharpening for small subjects should be done differently? I currently use 110% with radius 0.5. Maybe if i dropped it to 0.1 or 0.2 it would bring out more detail on a smaller subject in the frame?

is my thinking correct?

[arash_hazeghi]

Thanks for the comments guys.

In the raw file, eventhough the bird is smallish in the frame , there seems to be enough detail. Do you think the sharpening for small subjects should be done differently? I currently use 110% with radius 0.5. Maybe if i dropped it to 0.1 or 0.2 it would bring out more detail on a smaller subject in the frame?

is my thinking correct?

sharpening does not depend on the size of bird. can you post a 100% crop from RAW?

[shane shacaluga]

Will post it shortly. I was under the impression that because we reduce the size of the image to 1200 pixels before sharpening, a small subject such as this one would have a lot less pixels on it. So a bigger radius would not show the fine detail as a smaller one would.

I may not fully understand what increasing or decreasing the radius actually does

[Marina Scarr]

I think this image is very strong. I love your composition and all of the environmental elements, as well as the pose of the bird. It all came together very nicely.