Birds of a Feather

Before I picked up my 70-200 f/2.8L IS lens, I had been using a 75-300 IS lens that I bought after I realized the 70-300 non-IS lens was just not going to cut it for what I was going to be shooting. Ok… So it was an expensive learning curve but the 75-300 IS still has a place in my lens case.

Anyhow Evelyn and I were walking back from the Grand Haven pier from a windy and cold shoot of frozen Lake Michigan when these Seagulls seamed to be impervious to the 18 degree weather. I had the 70-200 2.8 lens mounted and snapped a bunch of these birds. By themselves they were not that exciting but when I assembled them into one image it took on a whole different look.

I synced all the images in lightroom for white balance and color then opened them in Photoshop. I left the bird flying to the left alone. Each of the others I did a close lasso and feathered the selection by two pixels. The I dropped the selection onto it’s own layer and finally dragged the layer into the primary image.

The feathering of the birds left just a little cloud effect around each bird and as long as the bird was positioned in another clown the selection would go unnoticed.

After creating the fine art digital frame, the whole image was still missing something so I made a copy of the bird image, resized it by using transform and but a drop shadow on the deal.

I’ll talk about digital framing in another post. For now, take care and keep looking forward.

Doug