I have been photographing more so called 'easy' subjects of late, 'Geese, Pigeons, Ducks, Gulls' just to get decent practice in without the frustrations of having a target bird constantly fly off whenever I try to get close/ closer to it!
At the local river all of the above mentioned birds are pretty easy to get nice and close to, and armed with a loaf of bread you can attract them anytime!
These gulls are some of my favourites, and provide plenty of opportunities for flight shots, they are so agile in flight that if you throw a bit of bread in the air (when feeding the ducks) rarely does it have chance to hit the ground or water!
Canon 20D, 400 5.6
Manual Mode
1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 800
580 EX II + Better Beamer @ -1 FEC
Handheld
Cropped to about 70% area of original + also removed some small specular highlights from beak.
Am not sure if it might need a little bit of CW rotation? Or indeed some noise reduction on the bird itself? (Topaz Denoise seems pretty good at this without adversely harming the detail).
Please let me know your thoughts. :)
Last edited by Julian Mole; 12-13-2009 at 10:54 AM.
Hi Julian - you are indeed correct - these guys make great practice subjects - will do anything for a bit of food :)
Exposure looks good - Good HA and eye contact, BG is good makes MR Gull pop. Noise looks OK to me.
Am seeing a little bit of a halo around the bill - maybe use the refine edge technique (See eductaional Resources forum)
Good show :)
Thank you for the comments. I didn't notice the sharpening halo until I was just posting the image, funnily I did actually use "refine edge" (and have already read the "tutorial") so I guess I may just have expanded the selection a bit too far from the edge of the bill (even though I did use a 3.0 pixel feather).
Anyway, I shall experiment with bringing the selection back closer and seeing if that helps - I have been spending loads of time in Photoshop recently as I just got the Digital Basics to help me improve! :)
Yes, they can agile and acrobatic when there is food around, I practiced with them too.
Love the side portrait look and the background compliment well with the bird. Your gull also sharp with good details too. I would try to run a small NR on the bird and see what happen, but the image looks alright as is. I think CW rotation is just a personal taste, for me I don't think you need any.
I reread the "Refine Edge" tutorial and realised I hadn't followed the process to the letter - hence the sharpening halo! So I decided to redo the processing on this image, this time I used Topaz Remask to cut out the bird, put it on separate layer and did the sharpening on that - thus no halo, but the black bit at the bottom of beak does look a bit funny! (due to resizing I think as the full size version looks OK)
Last edited by Julian Mole; 12-13-2009 at 11:28 AM.
Black Headed Gull
