Working Hard

[Don Lacy]

The male Least Terns were working hard bringing fish for their chicks and mates.

40D, 500 f/4 IS, 1/1600 at f/5.6, Aperture Priority, Evaluative Metered + 1.33, Raw, ISO 400, Tripod, Cropped and cloned out some dark areas in the BG

[Bill Jobes]

Nice photo Dan, with the tern stepping and the dangling morsel !

You might want to pull some detail out of the head blacks. I was able to do so with the shadow/highlight adjustment in PS.

But that's strictly a matter of personal preference, and the image is a good one as presented.

[denise ippolito]

Don, You guys cleaned up there. I like the shell covered BG and the blue strip on top very much. I might take a slice off the bottom if it were mine. Nice sharp details and lovely pose w/ the raised foot and the fish.

[Harshad Barve]

lovely feets and HA here , nice BG and I liked this very much as posted
TFS

[Danny Laredo]

This is real nice Dan.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Nice image, I love the white/blue gradient in the background. Good detail except for the head. Shadow/highlight in PS IMO will do little to increase detail there, and likely induce artifacts. Much better to dodge details in with a small low opacity brush, but it simply may not be possible. The exposure compensation you used seems reasonable, but apparently insufficient.
I checked the black head area with the histogram and info eyedropper tool in PS, and although not reading zero(pure black) they are consistently reading the same value for Red, Green, and Blue channels.This indicates that they were pure black, or very close to it, which would contain no detail, and were lightened in post processing. It also indicates detail recovery, by any method, is unlikely.
Best to expose for the blacks in the first place, which will make the image appear washed out on your camera LCD, and deal with the recovery of whites in post processing. my $.02. regards~Bill

[Ofer Levy]

Stunning image! Would crop off the bottom.

[Sid Garige]

Great job with exposure and eye contact Don. Excellent details. Went there today again. Not as productive as last week.

[Troy Lim]

Nice exposure, BG and the fish just made this shot even more interesting.
TFS.

[Bill Jobes]

Here is a look with some of the black details recovered as I mentioned above.

There's lot more available, but I wanted to preserve the natural look of the excellent initial post.

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Beautiful work Don. Love the low angle and the excellent color and detail. Excellent eye contact and of course the fish is a wonderful bonus. Congratulations on a stunning image.

[Troy Lim]

Bill's repost is great.

[Don Lacy]

Thanks guys for the comments. The issue with the blacks is to much contrast when I did an S curve in PS. The raw file has plenty of room before the black clipping point and has very little detail. This is the file straight from ACR and if you pull it into PS and check the histogram you can see that the blacks are not clipped but still very little detail around the head. It is true I could pull more detail out of that area as Bill did but it would not seem right to my eyes since least Terns always appear to have very dark feathers around their heads when I see them. With that said the image as posted needs to be reworked:)