Couple of Silver gulls. Comments please

[Mark Farnan]

Last Weekend (Easter), I went out for my first attempt at shooting birds seriously. As you would expect I have 100's of frames of blury birds, lots with no birds at all when trying flight and plenty of Out of Focus.

However, a Few shots came out enough that I'd appreciate some comments on them to see how they could be improved for future trips. Here is one. Couple more to follow.

Canon 1d IV, 300mm f2.8 with 2x TC Mk III.
ISO 400, 1/1600, f5.6 EV +2/3 no flash.

Lying on my stomach, camera/lens on a skimmer ground pod on the sand.


This shot was definatly a case of Art's comment from one of his books. "When the action happens, press the shutter'.

I have applied some fill light, cropped it about 25%, and lightened the shadow in the throat with local adjustment. All mods done in Lightroom. (Plus the usual levels / brigtness / contrast adjument tweaks etc)

The blue and white background is Sea, and breaking wave respectivley.

All comments appreciated.

Regards

Mark.

[Dan Brown]

Cool capture, Mark! I like the BG and the sharpness in the mouth/bill area where it counts. I think a couple improvements would be to move the bird to the right side of the frame and crop out the brown plumage at the bottom edge, as it seems to draw my eye away from the action (the big mouth!). There appears to be a halo on the left side of the bird, probably from the lightening of the shadow. If you can, protect the bg in that area with a mask and then lighten the shadow. This should prevent the treatment from spilling over into the bg.

[John Chardine]

Nice capture Mark. I am not sure exactly why many birds do these "mouth stretches" but you see it in several species. You have beautiful light and the background is very complementary. Agree with Dan that some lightening of the left side shadows would be a good idea. Fill flash would have worked well in the field. A smaller aperture would have given more depth of field to get the eyes into sharp focus. maybe some selective sharpening of the eyes can bring them back a bit. I would crop some off the bottom to remove the brown patch and also focus the attention more on the wonderful head.

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Mark, always nice to capture an interesting behavior like this! Nice job on the exposure and color rendition. I agree with both crop suggestions, and probably the easiest thing would be to crop from the bottom as suggested, then crop from the right until the bird is more in the center. Centering is not that evil when doing verticals. The issue with the left side is due to strong side-lighting coming from your right. This puts half of the bird in shadow and, in this case, has also cast a big shadow across the open throat which is the center of interest in this shot. Would be great to get this shot with the sun behind you!

[Mark Farnan]

This more what your thinking for a better crop ?

I have extra canvas left and top vs the Full frame actually. The image posted is approx 70% of full frame.

I started off lying exactly "down sun' to the flock on the beach, but then they migrated across and up on me, and unfortunatly, this guy was close and around the side. Still, pressed the shutter anyway, as advised !.

Flash wasn't attached, one of my notes for next time, is attach it anyway, even if I don't think I'll need it !



Regards

Mark