Christmas Day Mockingbird

[Stephen Stephen]

For a number of reasons beyond my control I haven't been out doing any photography for quite a while. Here's another image from Christmas day while we were near Varadero, Cuba. I had never had many opportunities to photograph Mockingbirds before but there were several around the resort we were staying at.

Canon 40D, Sigma 50-500mm (at 500mm) & Sigma Flash with Better Beamer handheld. 1/1250 seconds, F 8, ISO 500 with fill flash. Image cropped to about 55% of full frame.

I like the pose but I'm not sure about the overall exposure. Perhaps I used too much flash as some of the throat and breast feathers seem to have lost detail. A touch more head turn may have been nice too.

[Mike Milicia]

Great pose and perch !

Agree about the throat area being a bit hot.
Have you tried the Recovery slider in the RAW converter and/or doing a selective Linear Burn?
Might also consider lightening the eye a bit.

[Daniel Cadieux]

I agree with Mike (and with you, although I'm fine with the head angle). If all else fails and the whites are indeed wiped out you could "borrow" neighbouring pixels via the clone stamp, set at a low opacity (8-12%) and careful, and carefully clone in the hotspots.

[Stephen Stephen]

Thanks Mike and Dan. I went back to the original RAW file and saw that I had manually adjust the exposure to about +1.. I can't explain that except perhaps I accidentally did a bulk exposure conversion in LightRoom and this image got caught in those selected.

Anyway I thinks that the details in the feathers are now back in although it looks like I still need to brighten the eye more.