Capture The Moment

St Mary's again

Damaging my foot last Saturday meant that I didn’t really get to have a weekend: but by today it was feeling better – I could at least walk on it – so I thought a day off and a short trip to St Mary’s was in order.

I got the tide all wrong and arrived as it was reaching its height.

Not the end of the world – it would go back out – but in the mean time the birder in me was pleased to find a First Winter Little Gull among the gulls in the South bay (I got a record shot – it ain’t pretty, but you can see why they’re called “Little” Gulls).

I knew there’d be Whitethroats and other warblers about in the trees around the wetland, along with the usual suspects like Reed buntings and Stonechats.

Yes, they were about, but the gusty strong wind made them most uncooperative. Still, while talking to a birding mate called Brian at the South Bay and waiting for the tide to turn, I got a nice enough image of a male Swallow to remind me that Summer’s coming:

I then wandered up to the North Bay to see what was going on, and decided to settle down on the small amount of beach still available, to wait for the waders to arrive – I was in the mood for some Summer Plumage Turnstones and Sanderling.

Sure enough, after about 45 minutes of patient waiting, they started to drift in – and at that precise moment, a big daft Labrador came pounding down the beach, scattering the bloody lot…

Worse, it then decided that I wanted to play with it, and every time I tried to “persuade” it to go (I wouldn’t do anything to hurt it, but tried some fairly “robust” body language to persuade it that it wasn’t welcome) it got more excited by the game.

At that moment its owners appeared on the skyline – two airhead lasses who (I’m not proud to admit) got the loudest, most foul-mouthed roasting they’ll probably ever be on the receiving end of.

Mind you, I felt pretty justified in letting loose when one of them whined that “there’s nothing we can do about it…” while holding the dog’s frigging lead in her hand…

I stomped off in a huff, and returned to the North Bay.

And in less than half an hour, shot 2gb on the Sanderlings there..!

Now most of these are heavyish crops – they were a bit flightly – but the light, the (for a change) clean sand and the birds’ colours made me pretty happy with results.

No apologies for “Sanderling Overload” here – I like these guys!

And – just to round things off – one of a few Dunlin that were about:

If anyone is interested, these are all converted in Raw Therapee where I add some “capture” sharpening, adjust the highlights and shadows, and tweak the White Balance if necessary. I save as a jpeg at highest quality/lowest compression.

The file is then opened in Paint Shop Pro X2 where I crop and resize, apply sharpening (with the excellent “Focus” sharpening algorithm, which I honestly believe is the best sharpening tool available anywhere) and adjust saturation and Levels as needed – and I’ll adjust the White Balance here if I think it needs it. Although I agree with the Received Wisdom that this is best done at the RAW conversion stage, PSP X2 does this job perfectly well too.

Finally, I send the file to Neat Image which I use, not for noise reduction per se but to soften the background and increase separation between it and the subject – a faux shallow Depth Of Field effect. I also add a tiny bit (typically 15% out of 100%) of sharpening using the rather nice Sharpening tool in NI – it adds a nice little bit of “sparkle” to images.