Double-Crested Cormorant BIF

[Daniel Grossi]

I had no idea how common these birds were until I actually looked for them.

D500
Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6e VR @ 500mm
1/2000
f/8
ISO-640
Spot Metering

Cleveland, Ohio
May 2017
Cool and Partly Cloudy
1 Hour before Sunset

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Daniel and welcome to BPN. I do hope that you decide to join us here full time. The exposure looks fine and the image looks relatively sharp. The face and eye could use some Selective Sharpening. LMK if you need some help with that. The biggest problem is that the bird is angling away from you in flight. The other problem has to do with the wing position; the near wing is pretty much lost. If the bird had been flying toward you that would not have been as big a problem. Nor would it have been as big a problem if the near wing were fully down.

with love, artie

[Daniel Grossi]

Hi Daniel and welcome to BPN. I do hope that you decide to join us here full time. The exposure looks fine and the image looks relatively sharp. The face and eye could use some Selective Sharpening. LMK if you need some help with that. The biggest problem is that the bird is angling away from you in flight. The other problem has to do with the wing position; the near wing is pretty much lost. If the bird had been flying toward you that would not have been as big a problem. Nor would it have been as big a problem if the near wing were fully down.

with love, artie

Thanks for the criticism Arthur. I've been working on shooting in the right light and correctly exposing images lately. Getting out of auto ISO was not easy, but I'm glad I finally did. I'm not too happy with losing that near wing like you said, and now that I look at it, I see that he was angled slightly away from me. I recently changed my sharpening process. After making all my LR adjustments (skipping detail), I go into PS...

- Focus selection
- Fine tune that selection
- Filter: smart sharpen
- Invert selection
- Filter: Reduce noise
- Save as TIFF
- Return to LR and export

You're not the first to tell me to selectively sharpen and/or selectively reduce noise. Without the advice from you and other members my LR/PS process would not have evolved so quickly. I'll certainly be joining full time!

On an unrelated note - my rental 600mm f/4 gets here tomorrow and I'll have it for a week. It's going to be a good week...

Daniel

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Daniel, Good on losing Auto ISO (except in a very few specific situations). Doing so gives you the complete control that you need. The bird is actually angled well away from us :) I never use LR so I use a different method for selective sharpening but I am glad that the folks here have helped. And I am glad that you will be joining us here. Good luck with your rental 600; be sure not to drop it :) I look forward to seeing more of your images.

with love, artie