Nesting least terns in a sandstorm

[Greg Payne]

From 2 years ago. Orange Beach, Alabama
Canon 7D
300 f4 + 1.4 series II teleconverter
ISO 100
f11
1/400 second
60% of original raw file
conversion in LR5

[Diane Miller]

A neat idea, but it needs one bird much larger and better defined to nail down a composition.

There is a texture in the blue that matches that of the sand, but if blowing sand obscured the view of the front bird that much, I'd expect no texture to be visible toward the top. So I have to wonder, did you add the blue? And that makes me wonder about the "fog" effect. Hope I'm not being insulting, but to me it just isn't working. It reads too much like a filter effect.

[Greg Payne]

Pretty much straight from camera. I like the idea of one larger in frame The wind and sand blew me out shortly after this frame.

[Diane Miller]

In that case, apologies! I hope the camera and sensor survived!

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Guys, As the closest bird is neither sharp nor blurred enough I came up with this version... WDYT?

[Diane Miller]

I'd go the other way. I cropped out most of the sky, which has an odd-looking texture that doesn't appear to recede with distance as you would expect for waves that would go out of focus and be more obscured by the sand with distance. I used Nik CEP's Pro Contrast, Dynamic Contrast slider, to bring out the front bird then masked that layer with a gradient to leave the other birds as they were. Burned the FG a little and touched out some spots. Then cropped from the left a little to get the main bird near the point of thirds.