Brown-headed Nuthatch

[Cody Conway]

This was my first attempt with my 500mm F4 IS L mounted on my Jobu 3 Gimbal. Shot in side lit sun light, 60 degrees F. Body was a Canon 5D MK II with a 1.4x TC MK II mounted. Camera was set on Av.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8093/8430141839_b2755f2db9_b.jpg
ISO 800, F 7.1, Exp 1/1250. Exp Comp +-0. 700mm

Post Processing - slight crop, conversion from Adobe RGB to sRGB, watermark in Lightroom 4.1

thoughts?

[Doug West]

Pretty good first attempt.

The major thing sticking out is the out of focus branch. Get rid of that and you'll
improve this photo even more.

Doug

[Faraaz Abdool]

Beautiful shot Cody. I agree with Doug about the OOF branch, if you take that out and maybe darken the brightest spots on the perch you're going to have quite the cracking image here!

[Marina Scarr]

Congratulations on your new lens. You must have been excited to get it out there for some practice. It does take some getting used to.

You are at a pretty steep angle here, but I like seeing all the feathers. As Doug mentioned it doesn't appear as though the main focus is on your bird (esp it's head) so the bird needs another round of sharpening for sure. In the future, if you focus on your subject's head and then recompose, you alleviate this problem. While I am a huge proponent of not cloning, I would probably remove the branches in the BG.

Looking forward to seeing more with your big gun.

[Cody Conway]

Thanks, I am following after a couple photographers right now that are purist in images, that the name of the game is as little post processing as possible. I was able to get a cleaner shot with no background branch, and def tack on focus on the head. I have it linked in my introduction thread. I can definitely attempt some cloning to remove the branch and use a spot brush on the head to tighten up the focus spot with sharpening. I'm not a huge fan of the angle of attack either - Nuthatches are not a species that come low when photographed naturally in a tree. Any thoughts on noise / exposure?