Yellow-eyed Junco

[Charlie VanTassel]

In the USA, these birds only inhabit the lower SE corner of Arizona and New Mexico. While I was able to find some perching off of the ground, this shot is more in line with what Juncos do. Taken in Cave Creek, Arizona a few days ago.

Nikon D300
200-400mm vr afs on monopod
1.4 tc
1/800 @ f/7.1
iso 400
natural lighting

[Geoff Shapiro]

I've got plenty of the common juncos for the Oregon area in my backyard on a daily basis but I've never seen the yellow eyed variety. They sure are pretty and a really interesting contrast to the ones I see every day.

I like your capture of the bird in this photo but find the OOF fg area a little distracting. I think if you cropped up from bottom to just above that OOF area it looks even better.

[Maxis Gamez]

Hi Charlie,

This image suffer from a very distracting background and foreground. There are also hot spot around your main subject. Looks like your exposure was set for the darks and not the highlights. I usually keep one eye in my main subject and one in the background. :)

[Rosl Roessner]

Hi Charlie,
I don't mind the background; it doesn't look very distracting to me. For me only the dark area in the LL corner is distracting. But if you want, you can easily clone that area away....
I like the very impressive yellow eye and the good sharpness of the bird.

[Jim Poor]

Hi, I saw a few of these guys in the Huachuca Mtns, but didn't get any really good shots. I like that the BG has some interest, but I would crop away the top area of blown out white. A little crop from the bottom, and even less from the left might help too.

I would probably then burn the edges in an Ansel Adams style to draw more focus to the bird while still leaving the BG in place. The way I would do it is:

Draw a very loose selection around the bird, invert the selection and feather it 200-250 pixels. The call up levels and darken the edges until they look unnatural, Then I'd back off the adjustment until you only really notice if you compare a before and after.

[Peter Hawrylyshyn]

Charlie -
Just proves experts will disagree. For me, the background adds to the photo.

Would have cropped a bit from the bottom and perhaps cloned out LL

The bright area behind the bird can easily be darkened slightly using curves on a mask layer - see other posts today or send me a mssg if you need help

Great effort