Black-bellied Plover

[Richard Stern]

In flight, and molting into non-breeding plumage. Halifax, Nova Scotia recently. D300, 300mm F/4 + 1.7TC-E2 hand-held, 1/1000, F/6.7, ISO 800, hand-held. Moderate crop. Noise Ninja applied to bg.

Richard

[arash_hazeghi]

You got this beauty in action with nice BG but the image is far too noisy and oversharpened, need to do the processing again.

[Peter Wallack]

Arash seems to be correct. Noise Reduction with a careful thinking of how to set each slide would work instead of doing the whole processing again. Then again, doing the whole processing again may be a better learning experience. Well, doing mine first and his second would really give you a learning curve worth having.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the eye contact, BG and soft light. I agree, the image looks oversharpened. What settings did you use?

[Richard Stern]

Thanks, everyone. On close inspection of the image I agree about the over-sharpening, so here is a re-try as per your suggestions. This time I ran USM with settings of 92/0.3/2, and ran a little extra noise removal on the underside of the upper wing, and the sky, without extra sharpening. Hope this version is an improvement!

Richard