Laughing Gull preening

[Ron Sprunger]

From Fort DeSoto, last April. Trying to give Photoshop CS6 beta and ColorEfex Pro 4 a workout. PS6 seems better able to handle highlights in ACR.

Nikon D7000, 500mm f/4, 1/500 @f/5, Evaluative +1.0, ISO 220

Post consisted of cleaning up the beach a very little, adding some canvas at the top, and cropping off an inch at the bottom. Darkened the BG a little, and sharpened the bird w USM for web.

[dankearl]

Very nice IQ, Ron, cool pose and comp.

[gail bisson]

I like the preening pose and the head position is great. Good IQ and detail throughout. Looks a tad oversharpened to me. I really like the single pebble on the beach and the curvy wave line. Nice low angle and clean BG,
Gail

[Ron Sprunger]

Thanks Gail and Dan, I appreciate your comments. I think I agree about the over-sharpened look in the web export, though his head was almost annoyingly sharp right out of the camera. I'll go back and review my USM settings in the PS5 BPN export action.

[Frank Schauf]

Nice composition and excellent expsoure control and sharpness.

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Ron, many things to like here. the pose is excellent...so is the exposure. side-light handled very well. Iq is very good. I like how you got the wave such that one foot is out of the water and other in.

Canvas extension is pretty apparent. Its not an easy canvas to extend. would have been better if you had pointed the lens up a bit in the field.

I think the sharpness, for the most part is fine. With such strong side light, feather edges are going to be pretty sharp in the base image. In sharpening in post, it is wise to mask those out

[Daniel Cadieux]

I like this one alot. Love the half submerged foot and clean beach. Nice light and light angle (but I do wish the upper mandible was better lit).

[Ron Sprunger]

Kaustubh, I also thought the canvas extension too obvious. Guess I'm thinking now I'd have been better off to crop pano and not try to create the extra head room. Stretching and adding are certainly not my forte. That was the second or third day of my bird photography career, and I wasn't clever enough to think of framing differently. Thank you for the thoughtful comments, much appreciated.

Daniel, it did occur to me to lighten the upper mandible, but I was concerned about introducing even modest garishness by exaggerating the red color at all. Maybe I'll play with that a little tonight for my own satisfaction.

Getting this kind of assistance from such accomplished birders and photographers as yourselves is fantastic for an old novice who really wants to do it right. Thank you both.

[Arthur Morris]

The top looks fine to me.... None-the-less a crop top and bottom to 3X2 would strengthen this. The huge plus here is having the birds's face perfectly parallel to the back of the camera. That;s what we teach for preening birds. I'd go a bit darker with a bit blacker BLACKs.

[Ron Sprunger]

Artie, thanks for the advice. Here's a RP cropped top and bottom and left to 3:2 format. Darkened the whole a bit, lightened the upper bill and added 15 points black to the blacks, except on the darkest areas. It definitely looks better to me, and I appreciate the help getting there. Oh, and I moved the pebble up to get it in the smaller frame, using PS6's content-aware move. Used a bit less USM for the web export.

[Arthur Morris]

Looks better but maybe a bit too dark (be careful what you ask for :)) and maybe a bit over-sharpened as mentioned above. Might be best to start from scratch as this is a very nice image. I need to get over to DeSoto when I get back from California.