Crimson-hooded Manakin

[Arthur Grosset]

I had to go up a creek in a canoe amongst the mangroves to get this little fella on Marajó Island at the mouth of the Amazon.
I don't like using flash on manakins because they tend to spook with flash and the flash also distorts the colours so I had to use a high ISO and wide aperture.
20D with 400mm f/4.0 DO at f/4.0, 1/400, ISO 800, hand-held.
Cropped from horizontal, slight lightening of shadows, sharpening of upper bird, noise reduction elsewhere.

[Maxis Gamez]

Hi Arthur,

Very nice composition and colors. I see a lot of noise in the dark areas, perhaps using a NR software will help you with that. The composition works very well for me, perhaps a little bit of fill flash would enhance this image ever more.

[Linda Robbins]

It's a shame these birds won't tolerate flash. The high ISO you had to use produced quite a bit of noise. Still, the bird is beautiful, and I like the pose. You mentioned that flash distorts the colors, and I have encountered that same problem with bright red and orange birds. Reducing the saturation in just the red channel will correct the apparant oversaturation and odd appearance of red birds.

[Glenn Bartley]

Great effort to get an image of this species. I absolutely love seeing images from the tropics. Mostly because it makes me daydream about my next trip down there :) This is a really fine shot given the shooting conditions. If at all possible I think a tripod would have been a nice help here and given this image a bit of extra sharpness. But I know sometimes its just not feasible.

[George Scott]

I appreciate how difficult it is to photograph manakins, so this is a great capture in my view. The poor light conditions these birds often present themselves in make it difficult to get images that give you editing options due to high ISO etc - great image