Snow bunting

[Keith Carver]

non-breeding, this one was hanging out with roughly 100 horned larks

1DM3, 500mm x 1.4, ISO800, 1/4000, f5.6, +1.0EC, handheld
cropped 50% original, USM on bird 0.2/125/0. Bird is a little soft, but I like the pose and perch.

C&C appreciated.

[joel quenneville]

Nice perch and clean BG. The pose is good but I would wish for a head turn. There is a catchlight in the eye, did you use fill-flash? Some Shadows and Highlights might help, as would some selective brightening of the head.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great find, I like the snow bank and BG. You could try to sharpen the bird more and remove the blue cast in the shadows and plumage. It looks as if you could have lowered the ISO to 400 or so.

[Robert Amoruso]

Keith,

Perch and BG good as mentioned. Agree with Joel too on the pose and head turn.

Your ticket here would have been fill-flash to fill the shadows and relieve the blue cast due to the shadow.

I tried correcting the image and did the following in PSCS3


1) Hue/Saturation correction and remove all blue and cyan saturation. This got rid of the blue cast in the shadow.
2) Create BG copy
3) Did Shadows/Highlights correction on BG copy at 50/50/0 in the shadows. No hihglight adjusment.
4) Selected the eye and dark area around and then did a curves adjustment to brighten up that area. This amounts to placing a point at the middle of the linear curve and pulling up and left.
5) Step four gives you a curve adjustment with a blask mask and only the selection showing white. I then used the paint brush to paint with areas of the head and wing to further open up the shadows.
6) Sharpen at 125/0.2/0 once. I then did a selection on the head and sharpened that again at these settings.

It looked like critical focus was on the breast and not the eye.

[Keith Carver]

Many thanks, Axel, Joel, Robert. Robert I really appreciate your step by step repost. Much to learn here in PP technique; I'll go through this to replicate. Your repost is a huge improvement. To answer your question the central sensor was somewhere on the bird's head, and possibly not on the eye. I was shooting handheld and had time for only two shots before the bird flew.

[Juan Aragonés]

Very few things can be added after Robert´s excellent repost. Very good job explainig the PP process. I like the result that Robert obtained with your image Keith but I would try to keep a litle bit of bllue in the snow because blue balances very well with the gloden colors of the bill and face.