Osprey comin' at ya

[Noel Heustis]

I was laying on the beach photographing gulls and terns for so long this Osprey must have thought I was dead. He showed up looking right at me and circled around a few times trying to get closer each time. Luckily I had already positioned myself with the sun and wind perfectly at my back. I ended up with a few pretty decent frames.


Below are short rundowns of settings and my post processing:

ISO 400
AV ƒ/6.3
TV 1/4000
Focal Length 360mm
Manual Exposure / Servo / AF Point Expansion / Back Button Focus / Hand Held
Canon 7Dii and 100-400mm ƒ/4.5-5.6L IS ii USM

Processed in DPP4 and PScc

1) This is mostly full frame…I think I cropped a bit from the bottom.
2) added NR on both subject and BG separately
3) sharpened after resizing

Thanks for taking the time to look. As always, comments are appreciated.

[gail bisson]

Hi Noel,
Very good incoming flight pose.Nice and sharp.Both eyes are nicely and evenly lit up.
Too bad the sun was not a bit lower or the osprey in a bit more of an upward flight position so that the light could have lit up the underwing area.
Why did you do NR on the bird? Did you have to lift up the shadows thus introducing noise which requires the NR?
Gail

[John Mack]

Nice incoming pose of this osprey. The image looks a little underexposed.

[Daniel Cadieux]

I love the incoming flight path. Great eyes. I too find the image a bit dark, and I would not run NR on the subject or only very lightly if you must (the wings look smoothed out from it).

[Noel Heustis]

Thanks to everyone who either viewed or replied.

Gail - in response to your question about NR, I have just gotten used to adding NR to almost every image as a matter of habit. When converting the raw in DPP, I noticed a bit of noise in the 200% preview sub window on the adjust image detail tab (some noise in the under parts of the wings and more noise in the BG). In the first conversion I don't think I raised the shadows at all and wasn't even thinking that I shouldn't need NR if I hadn't raised the shadows..so this has been a good reminder to not do that.

John and Daniel - looking at it again, now I see that it was underexposed a bit.

In the repost I used the conversion recipe in DPP for ISO 800 instead of ISO 400 (which raised the Reduce Chromiance Noise to 5.0 and Reduce Luminance Noise to 5.0); raised the Brightness slider in DPP by .5; and raised the Shadows slider in DPP to 1.0. I didn't add any NR in PS, just sharpened after resizing for web.

Thanks again for the help.

[Arthur Morris]

Hey Noel, I am glad that I did not miss this one. Super sharp with great eyes but way too dark -- that said realizing that my monitor is on the dark side -- no Nikon pun intended :) I selected the bird, ran my NIK 50/50 on the bird only, and then pulled the curve up. A lot ...

I also leveled the image by running the ruler tool through the pupils -- it needed a bit more than 1 degree.

with love, artie

[Noel Heustis]

Thanks for taking time to help Artie. I hadn't considered using the eyes to level or pulling the curve up on the bird selection.