Gannet

[Xavier Maessen]

Shot in august 2009 at the Bempton Cliffs reserve in Yorkshire, England.

Canon 50D
300 f/2.8 non-IS + Extender 2x
ISO 500 f/8 1/1250 sec
Handheld

Cropped from 15 to 12 MPixels to enhance composition. I also used the clone tool to remove two out of focus gannet heads at the bottom of the image.

Thank you for your comments and critiques!

Xavier

[Michael Zajac]

I like the incoming pose. I would like a better HA. Beautiful to see the feet down. Nice BG and comp.

[Brian Barcelos]

Love the tail feathers and the feet look awesome. BG is also very nice. I too wish for a better HA but I think if you lighten the eye a bit would improve this quite a bit. Congrats

Brian

[Harshad Barve]

killer pose with control on expo , good details , HA mentioned
TFS

[Randy Stout]

Xavier:

Nice one for your first image post. I like the pose, nice that the bill is not merging with the feet/tail.

The image is a bit dark for my taste, but I did notice a fair amount of noise creeping in as I tweaked the exposure. Was the original a bit underexposed? How did you meter this guy?

I agree with Brian about a subtle lightening of the eye. When they are landing, the aren't going to have good eye contact with us, but just a bit more pop in the eye, without looking unnatural would help (per Brian)

I can see some subtle left overs from the cloning along the bottom edge, esp. straight down from the birds left foot.

Thanks for sharing, hope to see more.

Randy

[Xavier Maessen]

Thank you all for your comments. I suppose HA means "Head Attitude", but maybe I'm wrong?

Brian: you are certainly right about the lightening of the eye, it DOES improves the picture.

Randy: this one is shot in manual mode. The original was somewhat lighter, the darkening/contrasting was done with Canon DPP. I wanted to dramatize the picture, maybe a bit too much. Thank you very much for your interesting critique!

Xavier