Easter Experiments #3 - Crested Tern

[Mark Farnan]

All

Bird #3 from the Easter experimentation shoot.

Crested Tern, on the Beach, Coorong SA.
Lying flat on the beach, Sun behind me (ish). This was after I moved and tried to get the sun directly behind me from the flock. Once the 2 types of gulls were settled down after about 1/2 hour of me lying there, A small group (maybe 8) of these crested Terns came to join them.

Canon 1d IV 300 f2.8 + 2x TC Mk III mounted on a Skimmer Pod.
ISO 200, f5.6 1/1250s manual, no flash.
60% Crop (Horizontal cropped nearly square)

Adjusted Levels, toned down the whites a bit, added saturation. All adjustments in lightroom.

I've adjusted this hopefully more in line with the comments from the last Gulls post.



Questions on this one:
- The 3/4 body and the head turn. Interested in folks thoughts on position and head angle?

- The Sea went a bit grey in the OOF background. This ok, or should I send it back more 'blue'. Distracting or ok ?

- Position in frame / crop. (Verticals are full frame, but I've cropped out a chunk of blank space from the right)

- The Whites !!.

All comments welcome.

Regards

Mark

[Thanaboon Jearkjirm]

- The head angle looks alright to me.
- I don't mind about the gray color of the sea in the background.
- Crop feel tight in the bottom, so I would consider adding more room there.
- Good details in the white.

Love the low angle, the sharpness and the details. Good job on exposure, can see details in both black and white. The overall image seem a bit dark to me, so I might consider lighten image up a bit.

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Mark, good responses by Thanaboon and I agree with them. You really nailed the whites on this one, now just a bit of level boost in the mids and you will be there! You could use a curves adjustment, pushing the center point up a bit, or use levels and move the center slider to the left a bit. Good job!

[Mark Farnan]

Hi Mark, good responses by Thanaboon and I agree with them. You really nailed the whites on this one, now just a bit of level boost in the mids and you will be there! You could use a curves adjustment, pushing the center point up a bit, or use levels and move the center slider to the left a bit. Good job!

Thanks for the comments folks !

Your right, it is a bit dark. Thats what I get for not paying attn to the whole image !

Here's a repost, I've lightened it while maintaining the whites at current levels.

For reference I pushed the Brightness slider +40 in Lightroom, which mainly adjusts midtone bightness. I dropped the chest whites back a bit as well with some localized negative brightness of -40 @ 50%. The brightness didn't blow them out, but I like them better at the current levels I think.
PS: I do use photoshop as well, CS5, but for a lot of these I'm finding Lightroom does just fine for much of the processing. Obviously when needing to do any kind of real masking, touchup or layer work, its off the Photoshop !.



Regards

Mark

[Kerry Perkins]

Mark, well done with the repost! It is surprising how difficult it can be to see all of the issues in an image and we all have this difficulty at times. Good work on analyzing the image and correcting the overall balance!

[Mark Farnan]

Mark, well done with the repost! It is surprising how difficult it can be to see all of the issues in an image and we all have this difficulty at times. Good work on analyzing the image and correcting the overall balance!

Thanks Kerry.

[John Chardine]

Mark- I would have gone a bit further in brightening but the repost is a big improvement. I tried the middle slider in Levels on the repost and found it could take some more lightening without unduly affecting the whites.