Ring-billed Gull, 1st winter

[Bill Dix]

D90, 80-400 mm @ 370mm. ISO 800, 1/2500 @ f/7.1; 0EV. Aperture priority, AF-A, HH.

Not an exotic species, but it's one of the few I have to work with on the local lake, and the light was nice on Monday evening. Trimmed both ends of the histogram a bit, slightly boosted saturation on the bird, removed a double catchlight, cropped and sharpened. (Selectively sharpened the bird on the web-sized jpeg, but it always seems to look softer after posting.) Should I clone out the dark reflection above the head? Couldn't get lower from where I was perched, but I'll go back tonight and find a spot to get closer to the water. C&C appreciated.

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Bill I would crop below the dark spot up top and if you have it would like seeing more of the water circle up front !!

PS processing looks solid and you made a good exposure. Sharpening wise I normally apply some during capture, then some at the full size but only to the head area then use my output sharpening. For downsizing the image, always use bicubic sharper.

... btw the sharpening steps I do with PhotoKit, works great. Capture sharpening could be done also with LR at the time of importing with a pre-set. Choose Landscape sharpening. The program gives you two choices, one is Portrait which refers to less sharpening than Landscape, nothing to do with orientation.

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Bill,
This is a very nice capture. I like the color rendition and the fine details, agree with Mr. Forns on the cropping, turning it into a pano, thus placing more attention on your subject...well done...looking forward to your next one...:cool:

[Jackie Schuknecht]

Good advice from Al Bill. i do three rounds of sharpening. One is probably not enough. Still looks fairly sharp. What program are you using to edit?? One the whole think it is a fairly nice image that could be brought out well with some minor adjustments.

[Bill Dix]

Alfred and Gus, I appreciate the suggestions. I have re-cropped with more space up front and less at top and it does look better as a pano (I usually try to maintain a 3:2 ratio but realize that I don't need to do so for web posting). Normally I resize for posting in PS Elements using File/Process Multiple Files, change to jpeg and 1024 width and add the © all at once. But this time I used Image/Resize and resampled at 1024 width with Bicubic sampling. I then added some resharpening to the jpeg, but I'm now seeing some artifacts around the head and beak that I didn't see in the first post. I still need to work on the sharpening technique. Should I have masked the jpeg and sharpened only the bird in the final round of sharpening, as I did to the initial round in TIFF? ( I don't have LR.)

[Gus Cobos]

It does make a difference Bill...well done, much, much better...I like it...:):cool: