Eye of the Pelican

Pretty nice shot, Tyler; composition is good and the background could be worked in PS a little. With birds (actually any kind of animal) it is really important to focus on the eye, as you have done here. The image appears a little soft; this is likely due to you uploading the original-size image, from which PN then creates the medium sized image everybody sees first; I suggest you reduce the size of your uploaded image to - as recommended by photonet - 1024 max along the horizontal dimension for landscape (and I do something like 800 for portrait) and apply additional sharpening after the resizing. Apparently photonet applies a certain amount of sharpening to the medium size photo assuming the original is no larger than 1024; yours is 3x that and the loss in sharpness is not compensated by what photonet applies when creating the medium size one. In addition, nobody can view your original size image at once; since that would require a monitor with something like 4000 x 2500 resolution.

To answer your questions: the Atlantic and Pacific Brown Pelican differ in that the Atlantic one does not develop the red spots in their breeding plumage.

I have not used a polarizer in my shots yet; for a variety of reasons. Foremost, they cost 2 f-stops of light, which even with our bright sun here in California I can ill afford. Secondly, I shoot mostly hand held and that gives me some trouble handling a polarizer while holding the lens and the camera; a third hand would come in handy. When used, it would lessen or eliminate reflections from the water; for maximum polarization, the incoming light must have an incident angle of 30 degree, and the camera must be aimed at the subject at an angle of 30 degree from the other side. Water will become transparent then, which is not necessarily a desirable effect. It could be useful, however, to reduce some glare on the bird and I may give it a try.

Thanks for commenting on my shots. Regards, Dieter. PS: I have worked on your image a little with PS and attach it here; let me know what you think.

I'm trying to get into some nature photography and would appreciate

some feedback on this or any of my other shots in the same folder.

Thanks!