Gull Landing Shot

[Eric Patdu]

Hello all,

Here is another gull flight shot. I would love to hear your comments on the composition and PP work.


Shooting Info: February 23, 2011, Canon XSi + EF 300mm f/4L IS USM, f/5.6, 1/1000 sec, ISO 200, -0.7 exposure compensation, hand held

[Julie Kenward]

Eric, the colors in this image seem a bit funky to me - the water and wings especially. I like the pose of the bird but wonder if a more vertical crop would work here - either that or a bit more canvas on the left side for him to fly into.

I would also have bumped up your ISO to 400 and tried to sqeak out a little more ss and DOF for that back wing.

Overall it's a nice image - I think you need to look at the colors and contrast and see if there's another version that works here.

[Eric Patdu]

Hello Julie,

Thank you very much for your inputs. I assume that you mean the brownish color of the ice. I tried to re-process the image and change the background color (the ice) to a more bluish hue (no further processing on the bird itself). I don't know what you mean by the bird's wing color though.

Here is the re-process image together with the original image file which is unprocessed, uncropped and just converted to JPEG and resized.

Looking forward to your comments.


Unprocessed, uncropped and just converted to JPEG and resized




Re-processed image

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Hi Eric. A few observations. The image quality could be better, and the crop explains one reason why. Any
substantial crop degrades image quality severely , and your original post was less than 25% of the original. Removing 40% or more of an image usually causes problems with a 12 MP sensor, the larger the sensor(MP) the more you can get away with.
Uneven lighting needs to be avoided; here the birds body is in the shade and underexposed and the wings are overexposed.
Insufficient shutter-speed is one of the most common causes of lack of image sharpness, especially in flight captures. Here the body is sharper and the SS was OK, but the SS was too slow for the wings. Wing blur does work to indicate motion, but it needs to be obvious, and is difficult to achieve. Normally you'll need at least 1/1600 -1/2000 sec. Image stabilization only pertains to camera movement.
Using too low an ISO limits both the shutter-speed and aperture. You needed both here.
Hope I've been helpful. regards~Bill

[Eric Patdu]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the detailed comment and critique. I greatly appreciate it and I am learning a lot from it. Will keep those things in mind on my future shots.