Gull In-Flight & REPOST + 2

This shot is one from the other day (Monday). I just fancied shooting from above rather than below for a change.

The techs are;

Body: Nikon D2Xs
Lens: Nikon 200-400mm f/4 VR & TC 17E II

Exposure Mode: Aperture Priority
Metering Mode: Center-weighted
Exposure Comp: -0.7 EV
AF Mode: AF-C
Sensitivity: ISO 400
White Balance: Cloudy
Shutter Speed: 1/3000 sec
Aperture: f6.7
Focal Length: 550mm

Tripod: Gitzo G1548
Head: Kirk Ball Head BH-1 & Wimberely Sidekick

C&C welcome! Thanks for looking!

It looks like a rather big crop Paul - could do with a pass of heavy NR on the BG and some USM or such on the subject.

Exposure looks okay

I think with a bit more care on the processing it might well look better.

Agree with Andy,with 1/3000 ss you could easily have dropped the ISO and lost a lot of the noise.

Stu.

Hi Paul

Nice view point - ditto Andy's comments!

david

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your comments. I have re-edited this image, does it look any better to you?

Andy, I did think it was a large crop at around 30% (is that large?). I prefer not to crop but needed to make the composition in this case. The BG is the sea.

When I shot this image, the wind was battering me at around 50-60mph all day (no shelter) so I increased the ISO for shutter speed as I am having serious problems with the sidekick and the ball head vibrating. Hopefully this will be addressed when the new Gimbal V2 arrives.

Many thanks again let me know what you think it all helps – Cheers!

Hi Paul,
It looks to me like you have applied the noise reduction to the whole picture and not just the background. If you have photoshop, open up a duplicate layer and apply the noise reduction to the top one, then open a layer mask on that layer and paint a hole in it over the bird. flatten the image and you should have a smooth bg and still retain detail in the bird. I hope you don't mind but I have had a quick play with it. I had a fiddle with the levels a bit as well and gave it some more usm.
There are plenty on here better at this than I but it has saved me so many pictures this winter that I figured that it might be something you would want to have a go at. E-mail me if you want me to talk you through it in greater detail.
eric

Cheers Eric,

Yes I did the whole image as you said, you've got it looking better than I did - cheers! I'll have a bash at it again - thanks for the tip!

Its's not brillant but I think I've got it here.

Looks much better, but your D2X is looking like a noise monster, i'm sure mine isnt that bad at iso 400...

Cheers Paul,

I think the wind doesn't help! Anything above 200 is shameful mind!

Looks much better to me Paul, the only thing to watch out for is that when you are painting the hole in the layer mask, you should work around the edge of the bird first with a small brush as accurately as you can, because if you look closely at your second repost, you will see that you have uncovered a wide band of noise on the background. I have to admit that you can see it on the one that I did as well, but I was hurrying it a bit. Take your time and change down in brush sizes for the bill and wingtips to avoid run-off. I usually set opacity at 100%, keep the brush size for the edges at 50-150 pixels depending on the res of your picture and use a hardness setting of about 50%. You can use a larger brush 'inside the bird, but you don't want to uncover noise in the background. If you do, you can always reverse the black and white setting and paint the mask back in. If your anything like me, you will now be wondering about all those other pictures in your files that could be better done this way.
HtH
Eric