Great Cormorant - A Composite Picture



Original



One of the pictures that I took the other day when I was at 3rd beach in Middletown, Rhode Island, was of a Great Cormorant flying. However, the picture by itself, although we gave a good look at the Cormorant was basically uninteresting.  Therefore, taking my artistic license.  I adjusted.  First, the picture of the Cormorant, and then inserted it into a picture I had of the moon with a blue sky.  I ended up with a much more pleasing picture.  Of course, when I show this picture, I do tell that it is a composite.  In my old days, doing black and white pictures in the darkroom, I also would make a composite.  Just because I take photographs does not make me any less of an artist, and when I adjust the picture, I add my personal likes on how the picture on how it looked to me.

Here are the steps that I used to create the final picture.

in LIghtroom

I opened the picture in Lightroom and adjusted it to give me the look I wanted of the Cormorant.

After levels adjustment

I then crop the picture, took the  picture into Photoshop and performed a  levels adjustment  to give me a pure white background.


Photoshop

 Then I selected the magic wand and selected the background and put it on its own layer and then put the Cormorant on its own layer

I then opened the picture I had of the moon that I had in light room and opened it in Photoshop , floated both images, then, utilizing the move tool, moved just the layer with the Cormorant in it onto the moon picture and adjusted it to where I wanted to place it.  Then saved the composite picture..
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Gulls and Crabs

Our Columbus Day weekend was beautiful for photography.  There was no rain in the forecast and I was out photographing every morning.  I ready put on my last blog about the American avocets that were Newport, Rhode Island.  After finishing with the avocets, I returned to 3rd beach in Middletown, Rhode Island, where there were a number of gulls catching crabs in the surf for food. 

 People tend to think of gulls only as scavengers, since they're used to seeing him and parking lots, especially of fast food stores where they are always looking for handouts.  Gulls to feed on dead or dying species of animals, fish are invertebrates that wash up onto the shore.  They also will eat baitfish from the ocean and, of course, follow fishing boats looking for leftovers.

The gulls were energetic and catching the crabs.  Then they would bring them to shore, where they would systematically eat them.  In fact, all the species of gulls that were there were catching the crabs.  That included Great Black-Back Gulls, Ring-Build Gulls, and Herring Gulls.

I am including a video that was made from individual slides showing what the gulls went through in order to catch a crab.

So don't think of gulls as pests, but as part of the normal ecological lifecycle where they serve as sanitation engineers.