Ospreys a trois

Love the action here, Bob.

Is this 90% of the original frame or is 90% cropped away? The image seems to be a bit flat on my end as if the shadows were opened up a bit too much. Still it's a nice capture of the behavior.

Best Regards,
David

It would be great if you could post a larger version of this. I love the capture of the competitive behavior of the ospreys, but the image lacks definition, like I want to squint and see the birds better. Still, you captured a great moment!

I'll agree with David on the photo looking flat. I also see some soft haloing around the birds and nest (which could have to do with the shadow/highlight tool if you used it). I could post a version as I'd treat it if you'd like.

Overall, I like the comp and scene - especially with the fish inclusion. Must have been neat to watch, although, of course, eye level would have been even cooler.

Appreciate the comments. Photo is 90% of original, sorry for the confusion. Used Level, Shadow, and Unsharp tools on the image. Tried using RAW mode for JPG but all the results I got looked way overprocessed. Still learning that tool - mostly trial and error.

Larger version will be posted later today.

A really neat scene you captured with 3 birds here Bob. To my eye it looks like you may have overdone the shadow tool. I use this tool very conservatively, usually not going past 5 or so on the first setting. In the field you need to use some positive exposure compensation when shooting against a bright sky bg if you are using evaluative metering.

Larger image posted.

With Bob's permission I've taken the original JPG and re-worked it in ACR. (I used PS only for the copyright and web prep.) Bob, I'll send the file back along with the ACR sidecar file if you'd like. Just let me know. Basically, the file was pretty underexposed, and a bit smeared (looks like some camera shake, even with the fast shutter speed maybe?). I upped the exposure by one stop, and then used the ACR curves and "Fill Light" to open the shadows. I added a bit of clarity (although it was causing halo's, so not much).

I also changed the white balance just a little and upped the brightness slider and lowered the contrast. Then a lot of sharpening and noise reduction; There was quite a bit of noise in the lightened shadows, as I'd expect. The masking in ACR did a very good job not sharpening the slight noise in the sky though.

Finally, a square crop and a slight vignette. I think this is as good as I could get it, and it took about 15 minutes. There may be better sharpening that could be applied - there's lots of methods for that that might be better, particularly some high pass in PS. This also looks a bit better - as most images do - because of the down-sizing for web.

WOW, what a difference. Many thanks to Dave for your time and effort in improving the photo. Sending it back to me will help me to learn how to improve my efforts.