I was at the Midwest Birding Symposium last weekend and on Saturday morning, I had the opportunity to shoot Ring-billed gulls in flight. Oh I know it's just a Ring-billed, but from this experience I gained a new appriciation of these guys.
I took some 800+ pictures and this is my personal favorate. I hope you like it. I would love any tips you might think would help. There was no more room to the righ side of this picture, so in order to get the whole wing in, I would have to add framing.
Shot with canon 30D, 100-400L IS f7.1, 1/1250, manual mode, ISO200
Gulls are great to practice on, readily available, come in close, and are pretty photogenic too.
I like the pose, the diagonal line in the frame, the clouds at the bottom are nice. Nice tail spread, and I like the splayed feet as well. It would be very easy to add canvas to the right on this one. If you haven't already done so, I might try a bit of shadow recovery on the underside of the wings. In a perfect world, I wish the bill was a bit more separated from the wing.
Lovely first post, Bruce, nothing wrong with gulls especially when you capture their beauty as you have done here. I especially like the fanned tail, the tilt of her (or his) head and the way that you've included the clouds at the bottom. Defiantly add canvas to the right so that the wing tip doesn't touch the edge. I hope to see more of your work in future posts.
Great advice given,.. in CS4 Image>Adjustments>Shadows/Highlights,..you will like it under the wings.
I assume you were at 400MM FL and has plenty of light, I light the ISO=200.
For me when shooting BIF, I shoot wide open, I would have open up if possible. Fast is a good thing, in this case you nailed it anyway. I assume you metered off sky and had a positive EV. Important to have tonal data in the most right stop in histogram. Do you have APBII and Digital Basics. Digital Basics has great examples of histograms dealing with lights on mid-tones. This will help you fine tune your exposures. Anyway, great first post, much better than mine - well done my friend.
Thanks Everyone for the tips and Welcoming me to the board! I have PSv7 and I don't think it has the showdow/highlights. I also have light room, so maybe I can use the "fill Light" feature and bring up the underside of the wing.
I met Artie at the MBS (Midwest Birding Sympposium) and bought all the books he had including APB11 and Digital basics, so I'm curently reading though those.
I metered off the sky then added about 2 stops and switched to manual so every exposure was the same. Most of these were shot at 200mm. Everytime I tried to zoom closer I cut too much of the gulls out.