Category Archives: Birds in Flight

Herring Gull in flight (Juvenile)

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Herring Gull (juvenile) in flight

The picture of this Herring Gull in flight was taken at the Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge. I really enjoy taking pictures of birds in flight. This picture is very peaceful and gentle to me – like a mediation. I project to the sense of the overseer, the all-seeing, the lightness of being.
The jagged wing feather enhance the picture by adding more interest and detail than a “perfect” feather configuration.

Least Tern in flight

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Least Tern in flight

The picture of this Least Tern in flight was taken at Nickerson Beach, Lido Beach, NY. I think I am starting to resolve some of the noise problems with the CANONEOS7D in the final picture. Most of the CANON EOS7D noise problems show up in the light areas of the pictures. It really helps to get the perfect settings during capture but with birds in flight, it is more difficult to be right on.
I use Noise Ninja when in Adobe Photoshop and then use the history brush to “bring back” the original sharpness of the subject. I found that when in Noise Ninja, using the history brush, I change the opacity of the brush many times in order to control the amount of noise or sharpness remaining in the final picture.
In this picture of the Least Tern, I left all of the Noise Ninja filtering in the white areas and was selective in the gray areas so that I could get the impact of the feather detail.

Great Egret in flight

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Great Egret in Flight

The picture of this Great Egret was taken at a Nature Conservancy in Southampton, NY June 5, 2010. I am really enjoying the effect of having the bird against a white sky and desaturating the “noise” to create a more “artistic” style. It is hard to go wrong with a good capture of a Great Egret in Flight.
Instead of fighting the noise from my CANON EOS7D with the 100-400mm lens, I am starting to really enjoy working with it – at least in this type of capture.
A couple of days this week I put the CANON 70-200mm lens on the CANON EOS7D and the results were so very different. I will include some of the pictures in some of the next posts.

The practice of flight

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Herring Gull in flight

I am very lucky to be able to have meaningful conversations about photography with a colleague at work who has been a professional photographer for many years. I bring this up because he spoke about sculpting objects with photographs as opposed to presenting flat picture.
We could see that the pictures that I have been taking with the CanonEOS7D have more sculpting qualities because of all of the information I am able to work with.
This picture and the others in this series exemplify this quality which is very attractive to me especially since I am working basically with white on white. I pulled out alot of my photoshop skills to create this image but I feel it was well worth the time and effort.

Herring Gull in flight

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Herring Gull in flight

In order to continue my attempt to improve my skills in shooting birds in flight with my Canon EOS7D, I have been going to where the Gulls are. This was taken just past the Verrazano Bridge off the Belt Parkway on the perfect day. It was overcast and windy when we pulled into the parking lot. I noticed the spot where the Gulls were stalled in the air by wind and I got as close as i could to the gulls and started clicking away.
Once again I came home with a bunch of noisy pictures from my Canon EOS7D but I did some serious work in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop and came up with a few pictures I am very pleased with.
Inherently I am the type of person that likes to break rules. The one here of not having the whole bird in the shot I think works really well. I worked on other pictures where the bird was cut out of the frame that I would have normally deleted and I am reallly liking the sense of movement that is being created.