Sandwich Tern

[John Mack]

Portrait of a sandwich tern in early morning light. Image adjustments in Lightroom. Hand held, full frame.

Canon 5D MarkIII
Sigma 150-600 Contemporary
600mm
ISO 400
f8.0
1/500sec

[Doug Brown]

Nice detail. I think you could bring the blacks up a bit, and I would have liked a slight head turn towards the viewer.

[Daniel Cadieux]

I love the bill pointing down, which caused the back of the head feathers to raise up. Yes, the blacks could be lightened a tad, but I'm enjoying this portrait quite a lot!

[Isaac Grant]

This is a nice and simple portrait of one of my favorite terns. Like the way it looks against the blue background and I l don't mind the head angle. Makes me think it is pondering something.

Hope you don't mind but I worked on your shot a bit.

Added some canvas to the top and did a content aware fill
In selective color I added some black to the blacks, to the neutrals and took away some black from the white. Also reduced the blues and the greens in the whites in hue/saturation as they seemed to have a slight tint to me.
Ran detail extractor/tonal contrast on the bird only at 25% opacity to bring out a bit more in the blacks and whites
Also did a highlight/shadow adjustment
Of course it is always harder to do work on a small version and would be better on the original. I think the difference is subtle but effective. Whites on my version are probably a bit on the gray side but didn't want to mess with it too much. Just to give a basic idea of getting more canvas and more details in the whites and blacks. You could easily fix that on the original.