Veery.

[Daniel Cadieux]

An old upturned and rotting root growing some fresh new foliage made for a pretty neat perch. So I setup my speaker near it and physically removed some intruding foliage around the edges and prayed the Veery (which I could hear in the distance) would accept my offering of a good stage to perform from. It did, but as luck, or bad luck, would have it the sun peaked out of the clouds for a mere few moments just as my subject landed on the perch - this caused some distant ferns to become glowingly backlit. Of course once the subject hopped off (and refused to repeat) the sun hid behind the clouds again. I had to tone those bright areas down in post.

Canon 7DII + 500mm f/4 II + 1.4TC III, manual exposure, evaluative metering, 1/160s., f/5.6, ISO 1600, natural light, handheld, FF, eye work, burn tool and sponge tool (set to desaturate) on the brighter areas of the BG. NR to the BG.

[Michael Thompson]

wow, what a fantastic perch! Nice bird, hard to see much less get a good photo of, nice singing pose! ~MT

[arash_hazeghi]

sweet calling pose with a beautiful perch and BG to go with it

[William Dickson]

Very nice Dan. Love the colours and the calling pose. You did very well with the processing. Never seen this bird before, so TFS. Looks a wee bit like our Song Thrush.

Will

[Jonathan Ashton]

Very pleasing image I like the presentation.
Do I see evidence of cloning bottom RHS where there is a bright leaf?

[Frank Schauf]

Gorgeous light, comp and pose. Congrats on this one.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Thanks guys!

John: Something does look funky there, not sure what it is but now that you point it out I can't help but keep staring at it, like a big zit on someone's nose...it will be cleaned up for sure :-)