Boat-tailed Grackle (m)

[Joseph Przybyla]

I was walking around Circle B Bar Reserve in Polk County, Florida, this bird landed briefly on a sign right next to me. I moved to be on the light angle and got off a short burst before it flew away. Comments and critique welcomed and appreciated. Thank you for viewing.

Nikon D500
Nikon 80-400mm F/4.5-5.6 VRII AF-S ED HH
1/2000 F/8 Matrix Metering EV +2/3 ISO 2000 Auto 1 WB, image captured at 400mm
Post processed in Lightroom Classic, Photoshop CC 2020 and Neat Image for noise reduction
Cropped for composition and presentation

P.S. Learn more about Circle B Bar Reserve in the BAA Middle Florida Photography Site Guide that Artie and I co-authored. It is available at this link The BAA Middle of Florida Site Guide (https://birdsasart-shop.com/the-baa-middle-of-florida-photographic-site-guide/)

[Bill Dix]

Lovely range of colors, and good HA. I might be tempted to do just a bit of eye work.

[John Mack]

Solid portrait with a nice pose. Love the colors on the bird as well.

[Brian Sump]

Joe, the head is really noisy for me. Just not working unfortunately.

Also some artifacts above the head and back in the sky on my larger screen.

[Joseph Przybyla]

Joe, the head is really noisy for me. Just not working unfortunately.

Also some artifacts above the head and back in the sky on my larger screen.

Hi Brian, thank you for viewing and commenting. My guess is that your new NEC display is 4k and that you are enlarging the image to look at it. To see what you are describing I had to enlarge the image to 2:1 to see it. This is getting weird, I checked the original and the artifacts surrounding the head are not there but the converted 16 bit TIFF has them. I didn't do anything to the background in post processing the image. I will convert the original again and see if I can determine when they appear.

I'm back, just discovered that Neat Image noise reduction created the artifacts, now I need to find out how.

[Brian Sump]

Hi Joe, good work. On the artifacts, yes I noticed on the larger monitor but did not enlarge. I always tether to my MacBook Pro 16" and noise was evident on both.

Curious what you find out.

[arash_hazeghi]

this one looks strange indeed, it looks like you did some highlight shadow adjustment that caused a ton of noise and strong magenta cast, does not look like a grackle as presented.

TFS