Crop. 50% levels & contrast. Lightened color in ocean. unsharp mask.
I stuck around Natural Bridges State Park in Santa Cruz for a couple of hours this afternoon (not a hardship) with the 500mm lens trained on a large rock populated with brown pelicans. Suddenly a whole squadron of them came in to land. This was the best of the lot for the purposes of the Challenge. I am lucky to have a couple of others that work well for other purposes.
I used the Sports Mode for this sequence - the camera made faster and better decisions in this situation than I could. (Although I'm not happy with the 400 ISO speed.)
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This is really something to look and wonder at for quite awhile. It seems to show that he is using every feather in fine tuning his approach - look on ye aeronautics engineers and despair! The asymmetry is a delight.
"Left 45 degrees, down 5 feet, proceed visually and contact ground (water?) control on channel 1143" - or something like that. :-) That image is so cool. This duck looks like he's been through the mill though. Feathers rather worn here and there. All of which we wouldn't know except you stopped him cold - with great focus. Good capture. Congratulations and good luck with the challenge.
I have come back to this figure several times. It is a wonderful example of stopped motion. Yet, the image rises much higher in my estimation because there is something both ominous and exalting about it. It offers a mix of feelings. Anyway, this is an excellent capture with ample detail. Bumping up.
Very nice shot. You got a lot of great detail on the duck, but it looks like that resulted in a bit of noise in the background. You could try just sharpening the foreground on shots where the background is supposed to be out of focus. Still, this is a good photo that works great for this challenge.
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