Taken a few months ago. This was my favourite gannet shot, still is. I had to climb halfway down the cliff for this:D. From memory the background is a sandy cliff or sand stone. The sun was getting quite low.
Muriwai Beach, NZ.
canon 40d
100-400L IS
1/640 @ f16
ISO 400 (auto)
flash (can't remember flash settings, no info in metadata)
Very nice portrait, good head angle, sharpness and BG colors. It could go a tad lighter for my taste and I would run NR on the BG. If it were mine, I would remove the dark vertical area underneath the tip of the bill.
Very nice indeed. Agree with Axel about the NR on background, and the dark vertical line beneath bill.
On my monitor, I really like the luminosity of the image. I tend to like images a bit darker than the average person, so take that into account,but this one looks fine to me.
Axel & Randy, thanks for the advice. Yes I the vertical line will go. In LR2 is it possible to do NR on BG without affecting the bird? The only way I know of is to slide up the recovery slider which does the whole photo.
Cheers
Martin
Very nice portrait, Martin. Muriwai is a great spot (hoping to get there again later this month)- if the weather co-operates you can get nice sunset BG and fillflash the bird as you have done very nicely here. Your small aperture have given a good DOF to maximise the feather textures. Good advice on removing the dark streak in the BG. Not sure that you can do selective NR in LR - I always do this in PS on a layer so can mask it to where I want it. Pushing up recovery slider is mainly to try and recover bright highlights that are clipping.
Thanks Tony, I suspected as much about NR in LR. I'm just coming to grips with LR, now looks like I may have to get PS and start learning all over again.
Cheers