Taken this morning at White Rock Lake... Overcast and foggy early. One of the better landing images I think. I'm going to miss these guys terribly when they head north again.
Nice landing pose captured. I like the the stretched wings and would sharpen the bird a bit more and wish for better separation between the bird's left wing and the land.
Steve - are you using the masking option in lightroom when you sharpen? Hold down the alt key and bring the slider up to 80-90% to see what happens. This applies an edge mask to the sharpening so that you don't unintentionally bring up noise. Better yet is to do this in photoshop then you can change the blending to allow sharpening to occur in the midtone regions only. This allows you to sharpen more heavily without getting halos. Check out Bruce Fraser's "Real World - Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop CS2" for a much more in depth discussion of this. I use an action for this based on his guidelines and it works great and doesn't take much time.
Good capture of the pelican. You might consider getting rid of the background as it doesn't add much and distracts from the bird. Just some food for thought.
"Hold down the alt key and bring the slider up to 80-90% to see what happens. This applies an edge mask to the sharpening so that you don't unintentionally bring up noise."
I had not been doing this... Thank you as always for the tips! You are always willing to help and I appreciate that!
This repost uses your suggestion. I wanted to go ahead and load it here so I could compare apples to apples as the image always seems to look different to me here than in LR.