White-breasted Nuthatch

[Joaquin Barbará]

So here is today's attempt. I feel quite smart today because I bought the National Geographic Bird Identification App for my Iphone and according to it what I photographed today is a white-breasted Nuthatch.

135808

This is the original frame with metadata.
135809
This is with LR adjustments including crop
135810
The file was then opened in PS, the bird and the branch were selected using ReMask and the layer duplicated and the mask inverted. The background was adjusted using the DeNoise and the bird and the branch were adjusted with Topaz Detail.
Hope you guys like this one better than the previous one. :)

For the last two days I have been using Auto-ISO and I still don't know how to feel about it. I reasoned that I am shooting wide open or at an f/stop of my choosing for a particular reason and that I need to have a minimum shutter speed to avoid camera shake so the idea of letting the camera decide which ISO to correctly expose the frame seems OK. After 2 days of shooting, I have not had a single frame where I said the camera exposed it way off, sure I have a bunch of pictures with a lot of noise but they are sharp and correctly exposed. Am I missing something or do many of you use the auto-ISO function?

[Luis Patacao]

Hi Joaquin, like this one with the bird`s bill pointing towards the opposite direction of the branch. IMO, i would also have used a lower aperture to get more detail on the bird feather´s, but thats a detail, the eye and the head are sharp. I would also suggest that you crop a little less in this onde, taking the bird off the center.

Regarding auto-iso i`m not the best person to help you as i don`t use it, tried it once but didn`t liked, maybe because in certain situations you can work with a slower SS (as long as you apply good sharpness techniques) and the camera not knowing this will push the ISO up. Cutting a long story short, in some situations you can get better IQ by going the other way.

[Doug West]

Hey Joaquin...just a friendly reminder, per the guidelines...only one image per post. It's
pretty easy to miss.

You made the comment '...with a lot of noise but they are sharp and correctly exposed'.
That's not necessarily true. If your noise is due to an image being brightened alot in post,
that means the image was underexposed.

In this image the exposure looks fine. So even with an ISO of 2000, the noise is non existant.
The best way to to fight noise from underexposed images is to use your camera's histogram
and expose to the right. The more detail you can get in the right most box, without a huge spike,
while also having data in the remaining boxes, will give you the optimal exposure.

Hope that helps.

Doug

[John Chardine]

Hi Joachin- This is a pleasing image with a lot going for it. The image is sharp where it needs to be (eye, head), although more depth of field would not have hurt. I like the composition but I would give the subject a little more breathing room in the frame by cropping a little looser at top and to left.

Re auto ISO, I never use it because I want control over ISO, and anyway I use manual exposure mode 80% of the time. If it works for you I don't see much wrong with using it, especially if you are happy with the ISO performance of your camera over the entire range (rare!). When I use auto exposure I use Aperture priority 100% of the time because I want control over aperture as well. Shutter speed is then adjusted to about the duration I need for the shooting situation by adjusting ISO, always using the lowest possible value I can get away with.

By the way, as Doug mentioned, it's best just to post the image you would like critiqued, along with the technical details as text. Lightroom is a fantastic program but one totally stupid omission is that you cannot copy and paste the technical details of an image- you are forced to type it!

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Joaquin, if you are using LR3 I would suggest Clarity between 20-30, LR4 or 5.3 then as it's been so refined anything from 0-10 is perhaps more than enough, beyond and you will start to get a 'contrasty/gritty' look to the image, depends on what you wish for. Just a thought.

[Diane Miller]

This is a cute pose and good focus -- these little guys move fast. It's always a balancing act between ISO, aperture and SS, and the best choice often varies with each image. But I've never wanted the camera to make the ISO choice for me.

Cropping more loosely here would be my preference. With this much magnification on a small bird, DOF becomes quite small and you can get loss of fine detail from noise. Those would be somewhat minimized with a looser crop.

Sorry I didn't catch the one image per post thing earlier, but I do like being able to see your original LR window with the original file and the shooting data and then your adjustments. Maybe those could be put in separate but adjacent windows following the initial post of just your processed image -- with the final adjustment panel being composited to the right of the original window. Repeating the image itself in that adjustment panel is redundant with the original post.

I don't think that violates the spirit of the rule -- but if it does, please someone speak up. I'm fairly new here.