Rufous-Tailed Jacumar

[Paul Lagasi]

On one of my past trips to Costa Rica, while walking through the jungle underbrush, I came around a tree and there was this little guy at eye level, had time to pop up flash and get a few photos before he flew away.
D70 Sigma 50-500 @ 500mm f6.3 1/60 handheld

[Doug Brown]

Very sharp for 500mm hand held at 1/60! Great pose too. The bird is a little tight in the frame, especially the bottom. I would run some NR on the BG, and I would fix the eye. Here's a quick repost.

[Glenn Bartley]

I remember just missing an opportunity for this species.....I agree the image could use some NR on the BG and DOugs job on the eye is good. I would selectively do the NR though. You want to preserve all the details in the bird and perch.

[Juan Aragonés]

I agree about the noise in the BG. Doug´s improvement in the eye is very good. I would like to see a little more room at the bottom and the right of the composition and less at the top .

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great find and I like Doug's composition, and the eye looks better, too. I agree on noise reduction but not on the perch to keep the details. Thanks for sharing!

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Congratulations Paul on a wonderful capture of this little beauty. Great suggestions from above and I love all the wonderful detail you were able to capture in this image. Thanks for sharing.

[Paul Lagasi]

Thank you for the great comments, Doug, when you say NR do you mean de-speckle as in photoshop or are you using other software for this, I made the same changes to my image as above, eye, expanded frame at low end..but background still looks very noisy...even though I selected the background using magic lasso and used despeckle feature on it several times.

The 50-500 was a great lens but I went through 5 of them in a year..many software & mechanical problems (lens worked fine on my F80 but hated my D70 )but if they make one thats more buletproof, I'd buy one in a flash, just as a backup.

Paul

[Doug Brown]

I use the Noise Ninja plugin for CS3. It works very well. Another NR program that is quite good is called Neat Image. Your repost looks much improved, but BG noise is still an issue.