Northern Wheatear

[shane shacaluga]

This bird appeared out of nowhere whilst my 2 dogs were in a full WWF championship contest about 5m away from its perch. It tolerated me taking my camera out of the bag and walking up to it taking pictures after every step. This was as close as I got. I was using DX mode on my D800e so had to crop very little

D800e
300f4 + 1.7x TC
1/800
f6.7
ISO 800

Handheld. Cropped for composition. Cloned a bit of bright sky peeping through on top right hand corner and cleaned some dirt from tarsus and beak

NR on BG and USM on subject.

Thanks for viewing and please critique this pic

Regards
Shane

[gail bisson]

WOW! What a wonderful opportunity you had and you made the most of it.
I like the BG, the weathered post and the perky pose.
The side lighting works quite well but would have loved to see more light on the tail.
Gail

[Alan Murphy]

Gail said my thoughts. Nice plumage on this male.

[Alison McCoy]

Wonderful image. Very sharp, great job hand holding. Love the perch and the bg. The green bg makes the birds color pop. Lovely.

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks for the comments guys

I had a big thorn bush to my left and couldnt move any further. I needed the bird to turn slightly but I dont speak Wheatearish :)

[Girish Prahalad]

lovely IQ, perch, BG & light.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Shane, lovely pose, and I like the colours on this fellow. I quite like these weathered posts for perches, and you have a nice clean BG.

[David Salem]

The only thing that could have improved this image is a little better angle but besides that it looks Beautiful.. A few thorns aren't going to get in your way are they:t3 Very nice Shane

[Diane Miller]

Very nice pose ad IQ -- good work! The shadows on the post might have gone a little blue but no big deal. It's a very pleasing color palette.

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks guys haha those thorn bushes are nasty pieces of work.

Yes i noticed the shadows going blue. Its the same in the raw file. Any idea why that happens?


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[Diane Miller]

It's the white balance -- our brains correct it but there is a lot of blue in shadows if there is sky or water around to reflect it into shaded areas. Tweaking the Temp (and often also the Tint) sliders in raw conversion will correct it to whatever extent desired. Sometimes you can also resort to saturation of just the blues in the HSL section. All a judgment call.

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks for the info will look at redoing the raw conversion

Any idea if adding teleconvertor could cause this? I am using the 1.7x tc which apparently is not that good. Just wondering if this could be an effect


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[Diane Miller]

I can't think how it would have a direct effect on color, but if the camera is on auto WB, the less range of color it sees in a scene, the less good its guess at WB. So the narrower field of view in a telephoto shot might, to some extent, make the guess a little worse. That could vary a lot from scene to scene.

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks again. I have always used AUTO WB. May have to start learning how to set that correctly ;)

[Diane Miller]

Auto is fine 99% of the time. Always tweakable in raw conversion. The presets are often terrible -- you can see them in action by clicking through them with a raw file open.

Setting a specific balance is for when you want a set of shots under the same lighting to match in WB exactly (think an event), but it's often better to dial in the best setting on one file and just sync it to the set.

[Satish Ranadive]

Excellent image. Every thing is perfect.

Regards,
Satish.

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks Satish