Perched

[Scott Grant]

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3295/2859643795_a38b887e34_o.jpg

yesterday i decided that i had had enough of trying to shoot these little guys in the Lilac tree next to my house. i had read in Arthur Morris' "the art of bird photography II" that i may want to try setting up a perch like this.

i set this up between the Lilac tree and the feeder. within about 15 minutes of setting up things started falling into place. i must admit that i was very impressed with my own results as compaired to what i was getting just a few days ago.

this was shot on a D300 at 500mm with 300mm f4 and 1.7X Nikkor teleconverter. ISO was set to 800, an aperture of F11 and a shutter speed of 1/200 in manual mode. i used the SB-800 as fill flash with better beammer (maybe this was unnecessary???) at -3 EV. all processing was done in NX2.

i'm not too fond of how bright the perched is after exposure. i'll want to keep that in mind next time. also, i don't think i like the perch dividing the frame as it does.

does anyone have any suggestions as how i could improve here? all comments (and fantastic little hints!!!) would be greatly appreciated! ;)

[Ramon M. Casares]

Scott I work with feeders a lot and my fisrt advice would have to be... get a better BG one that doesn't hace shadowed ares, that will make you subject just pop out, the perch dividinf the frame doesn't look bad, maybe if you don't like it you can try puting it in a more horizontal position, but without loosing the diagonal, the pose of the bird looks great, I think the fill flash helped here and the light looks very good to me. Congratulations!

[Scott Grant]

thanks for the Reply Ramon! greatly appreciated!

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Nice soft light, head turn and details. I agree regarding the BG and might give it a bit more room. Keep them coming!