Arctic tern feeding.

[Robsouth09]

Hey everyone, new to the forums but thought I'd offer up a photo for some thoughts, I have only been actively shooting wildlife since about end of June beginning of July 2020. I know I have a lot still to learn and improve but I was really pleased with the below shot. let mom know your thoughts and any tips would be great.

thanks
Rob

Shot handheld on Nikon D800, 1/2000, f/8, ISO 800, 600mm (Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary)

S

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[Callie]

This is a lovely action image. Terns are some of my favourite birds, although I seldom get chance to see them. The image suffers fro overecposure on the whites. The white vertical band in the back also steals the shine from the tern. Depending on what you use for post processing, if a raw image, ACR is a good place to start to tame the whites. It also work on jpegs, but not as well. In PS, HSL will remove the blue cast in the wing. If you lasso around the whit vert bar, you van create a new layer and paint, using a soft brush, over the bright area, using some of the adjacent greens as base colour. When you are using the brush tool, press Alt and click in the frame to choose your colour. Postprocessing is a long and hard learning curve for me. I have tried very hard over the past two years, spending hours on You-tube videos and practicing, but it pays off. I am now busy redoing everything I have fixed over the past 14 years!

 

[Robsouth09]

This is a lovely action image. Terns are some of my favourite birds, although I seldom get chance to see them. The image suffers fro overecposure on the whites. The white vertical band in the back also steals the shine from the tern. Depending on what you use for post processing, if a raw image, ACR is a good place to start to tame the whites. It also work on jpegs, but not as well. In PS, HSL will remove the blue cast in the wing. If you lasso around the whit vert bar, you van create a new layer and paint, using a soft brush, over the bright area, using some of the adjacent greens as base colour. When you are using the brush tool, press Alt and click in the frame to choose your colour. Postprocessing is a long and hard learning curve for me. I have tried very hard over the past two years, spending hours on You-tube videos and practicing, but it pays off. I am now busy redoing everything I have fixed over the past 14 years!

Thanks for the tips, I agree my post processing isn't the greatest, I hadn't even really noticed the white band in the back ground, I'm using LRC but still just plod my way round it at the moment. I appreciate the comment and will try and redo the edit with your tips.

 

[Icarus]

Congratulations on an excellent action shot!! I agree with Callie's post and think that if this is a crop, I'd give the bird a bit more room to fly into as well.

 

[DRwyoming]

Great moment. I agree with the processing comments above. But I'd also add that assuming this is a crop, you don't need to fill every inch of the frame. Giving your subjects a little room to breathe can often strengthen images and is important if you want to matte and frame the image where you'll lose a bit with the matting.

Since you mentioned being newer to the game, pay attention to the brightness of your main subject vs the brightness of your backgrounds. Assuming you didn't actually fill this much of the frame and you were metering in one of the Matrix or Center Weighted modes the darker background (again if it takes up a substantial amount of the frame) will tend to over expose very bright subjects like this tern. Dialing in -.3 to -.7 or in some cases a full stop of exposure compensation will darken the overall scene including the tern.

You might very well be able to recover those bright highlights during raw conversion (if you're shooting raw) but if you're set up to photograph busy terns with darker backgrounds a bit of negative exposure compensation can help you nail the image in camera or at least give you more leeway for recovering highlight details in post. The opposite can happen if you photograph something like a Raven against a bright background (or a Black Bear taking up a smaller portion of the frame against a bright background) where you may want to dial in positive exposure compensation though in that scenario you risk blowing out the background completely. If you do use exposure comp, just remember to reset it to zero (no compensation) when that particular shooting scene is over so you don't forget and leave the compensation dialed into the camera for the next subjects that might be quite different.

Still, for being pretty new to this that's a really strong image! Nicely done!

 

[Robsouth09]

Thanks everyone for the great detailed tips here I really appreciate the help, unfortunately I live in the very north of Norway and we are very nearly into the season of no sun, (makes golden hour shooting difficult). So haven’t managed to get out to practice my technique But hopefully I can use the snow when it comes to help.

 

[Yezdi]

It's a great image as a newbie to wildlife photography. The comments above are spot on. You need to do a bit of post processing to your shots. For fast moving birds to get good feather details I normally would increase my shutter speed to 1/3200 if the available light permits.