Ring-billed Gull

[Dave Goldberg]

Attachment 195981


When a day long storm began clearing, I headed down to a local pond where I knew the gulls like to hang out so I could get some practice shots. Being very tolerant of people, and of course always hoping for a hand out, they let me get fairly close. I would have liked him to have been positioned a little differently on the post, but he wouldn't have it.

Shot with a Canon R7 with Sigma 150-600C, and exposed to the right at 1/400", f/6.3, ISO 2000, FL 403mm. Raw Digger showed no blown pixels. Denoised using ON1 and edited on Darktable, applying basic tone and color enhancements and removal of distraction on the post.

[Gerald Kelberg]

Hi Dave,

From the pose, it looks like he is auditioning for a "Grumpy Bird" role! Possibly not as tolerant as you think!

Nice clean detail, very sharp - almost to the point where the belly is looking a little crunchy.

I like the contrast between the bird and the background especially the rich colours in the upper portion. And the post has lots of character.

I think I would like to have more space in front of the bird - room to take off into!

Thanks for sharing, Gerald

[William Dickson]

I would go for a more landscape crop here. Showing less perch and more on the LHS. The BG colours look good and would add to a looser crop. I like the colours throughout and you got some great feather detail. The belly does look over sharpened, maybe wet feathers..But does look a bit crunchy as Gerald said.

Will

[Jonathan Ashton]

Well process from my POV, I l like the image size/orientation but would also go along with a little more space on the left.

[Dave Goldberg]

Hi Dave,

From the pose, it looks like he is auditioning for a "Grumpy Bird" role! Possibly not as tolerant as you think!

Well, he is a gull... But they do get pretty tolerant if they think there's a hand out for them (no luck this time)

All - thanks for your comments. I agree with the suggestions. I was really just playing around to see how much detail I could get at close focus and then the light turned very favorably. Over-sharpening is something I really try to avoid, but I've had to adjust a bit now that I'm applying output sharpening on a re-sized TIFF, as suggested here in the forum.

I have different shot that I'll share as well.

Thanks again for everyone's comments!

Dave G.