tern portrait

[pat lillich]

another Tern from Doug and Jim's flight workshop (though this one landed on a fence near the spillway to take a break from the feeding frenzy). Guessing from Paul's discussion of beaks that this one might be a Caspian Tern, though this seems shorter rather than more blocklike...

nikon d300, 300mm f/2.8 with tc, 1/2500 sec at f/8 iso 400, 0ev, manual, handheld
cropped and a little recovery done in LR, noise reduction and a little selective sharpening.

I think the whites looked hot after some shadows and highlights, so i darkened the whites just a bit in selective color

always appreciate any suggestions for improvement

[Dave Leroy]

Boy. Nice and close.

I like the composition. Another option may be just a tad off the top.

Whites do not look hot too me but perhaps a bit cool or a bit of blue in them. It may be an idea to try a bit less blue or more red to see how it looks.
Very well done.

I like the nice eye.

Dave

[pat lillich]

thanks Dave, do these whites look too hot?

(I wish I would get these closer to right without asking for input - I always seem to get so focused on one thing that i mess up others....)

[pat lillich]

Sigh.

did it again. Didn't notice that the bill had gotten over saturated in the adjustment.

ok - last try for now, sorry for the picture spam - this time I just stepped back in photoshop to before i tried to mute the whites.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Hi Pat. It is likely a Forsters Tern. Could be a common tern, depending on location. I suggest you do as much in the RAW converter as possible. I use ACR, but I assume lightroom is very similar. Exposure/recovery/Curves(Tone Curve) instead of shadow/highlight in PS to adjust lights and darks. The reason why using ACR (or equivalent) instead of PS is because there are far less artifacts, like halos, etc., and everything is easily accessible, Saturation of orange, and luminosity, can be selectively adjusted in ACR by using HSL/Grayscale (the squigly horizontal line icon), and there is a much better, and informative, histogram in ACR. regards~Bill

[Joel Eade]

Very nicely done, good work in getting in close, the exposure and sharpness look gorgeous to me.

[Julie Kenward]

Pat, in all your worry to get the whites right (which you did in the OP) you missed that the blacks were blocked. I opened the image in ACR and brought the dark tones up but even with them pushed up the area between his eye and beak is still blocked (you can tell because it has way less detail than the blacks behind his eye near the top of his head.)

I like the recrop suggestion and here is the version where I brought up the blacks. See how much more detail is there now?

[pat lillich]

so much to learn. I didn't even think of looking at the blacks - thank you Julie --- I'll go back to LR and see if there is anything to rescue there.

thank you Peter- I like the way you did the crop. I understand that there are many ways to look at composition - i need to read some more.

thank you William - as soon as you said Forsters I remembered the knowledgeable people in the workshop saying some of the terns there were Forsters.


ok - the blacks don't show as blocked in LR - so i must have done something to them in PS. will see if i can undo that mistake too...!