Submitter's name:	Olaf Greve
Title:	Head on
Gear used:	Olympus E-500 + OM->E adapter + (OM) Zuiko 300mm F4.5 lens
Aperture used:	Around f8 or f11
Shutter speed:	I think around 1/125th or 1/250th
Media used:	Sandisk CF 4GB, ISO 100 setting
Digital edits:	I now am the lucky "owner" (well, actually my boss is) of a Macbook Pro, with Photoshop CS 2 on it, so (of course) I decided to use that for editing this image, and the following steps were taken: -Cropped to a square format -Colour balance -> neutralise (for eliminating the blue cast, caused by an incorrect WB setting) -Smart sharpen -> Gaussian blur, 200%, 4-pixel range (to eliminate the slight motion blur) -Auto-levels (to give a more saturated colour balance) -Slight curves adjustment (to brighten the picture somewhat) -Downsized to the TOPE 800 pixels restriction
Technical information:	This shot was taken handheld, while slightly panning along with the bird. I played around a bit with the OM Zuiko 300mm F4.5 lens on the E-500, and the results are very much to my likings. Motion unsharpness easily becomes an issue (especially when not using a tripod, and/or when also using a 2x teleconverter), and such is somewhat the case for the original of this picture. Also, for some reason the white balance was totally off, and gave me the notorious blue cast that looks like pictures taken on daylight film, with an 80A or 80B filter. Fortunately I could easily correct this digitally.
Subject information:	We have been having some very nice weather so far this year, and during one of the weekends in which I had some spare time, we went down to the coast for two days. As always, our daughter was so obsessed with having pictures taken of her constantly, that I hardly got around to taking bird pictures. Yet, when I had a few minutes for doing so, I managed to get several seagull shots, and I liked the "in flight" ones best. This particular shot is my favourite, as I like the way the bird is taken almost head on.
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Comment left by: Chris (no e-mail specified)

Lovely framing. I think that there is a little movement in the gull, but it's a good job.

Comment left by: Chris (no e-mail specified)

This was very well captured, but I can't help feeling that there has been too much processing. I should be interested to see the original.

Comment left by: Wiliam (wiliam@orange.nl)

Maybe a touch on the soft side, but still a nice action shot.

Comment left by: The Photographer (no e-mail specified)

Hi Chris, as requested, you can find the original (downsized to 800 pixels format, but including all the other original bits, including the blue cast) here. I hope you guys agree with the edits I made, even if the sharpening was somewhat strong (causing a sharper bird, at the cost of introducing more speckles). :)

Comment left by: Graeme Pow (no e-mail specified)

Hang on, you shot this hand-held with a lens that has a 35mm FOV equivalent of 600mm?! Yikes! I'm mightily impressed. While I like the square crop I actually prefer the original format (I'm weird, I know, I know).

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