Red-capped Robin

[Jon Thornton]

Nikon D300, 20mm extension tube, Nikon 600mm f/4 VR, 1/320th sec, f/11, ISO 800, tripod.

These beautiful birds allow an extremely close approach, so after I'd taken a few shots with my teleconverter, I replaced my teleconverter with an extension tube and moved in close.

There is some noise in the BG. I don't mind this too much. It is quite invisible in an 8 x 10 print.

[Randy Stout]

Jon:

No image showed up.

Randy

[Jon Thornton]

Thanks Randy. My initial upload exceeded 200K, so I had to fiddle with it for a bit.

[Randy Stout]

Jon:

Very attractive bird, sharp, good pose. I would remove one of the catchlights. The main comment for me would be that the red channel is very hot as posted. You can see loss of feather detail compared to the blacks for example. Highlight recovery and reduced contrast will help some.
I would also be tempted to tone down the perch a bit (burn it in) so its not quite so bright.
Noise mentioned by yourself, but I would def. run noise reduction on the background for web use.

Hope you have some more of this lovely bird.

Cheers

Randy

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great head angle, good details, perch and BG. I agree regarding the oversaturated reds (there is a tutorial in the educational resources forum), removing one of the catchlights and would give it more room all around.

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

Stunning bird.
The noise and over sat. has been mentioned.

[James Shadle]

Before you remove one of the catch lights. What caused them?
Was flash used?
James

[Desmond Chan]

Beautiful bird !!

Tone down the red and the white would be what I would suggest, too.

[Jon Thornton]

Thanks for your comments everyone.

The reds print beautifully without any posterization at all. My guess is that the JPEG compression that I applied to keep this shot below 200K had a negative impact on the detail in the bird's red breast.

I agree with you about the whites. Although these look OK in a print, there is still some scope for increasing the detail in the bright whites. I will work on this tonight. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Rob Drummond]

Nice one John - I like the alert, almost inquisitive pose

cheers
Rob

[Jon Thornton]

Thanks Rob. I wish you could see the print sitting next to me. It makes the JPEG look really awful by comparison. Once I've added a bit more detail to the whites, I'm going to try an 11x14.

[Jon Thornton]

I've had another thought about the reds. They might appear posterized here because they are out of gamut in sRGB. I used the relative colormetric rendering intent when I converted the image from Pro Photo RGB to sRGB. Perhaps I should have used perceptual instead. What would Bruce have said?

[Kobus Tollig]

Ditto Randy. Still great well done

[Jon Thornton]

As I suspected, the conversion from Pro Photo RGB to sRGB caused significant clipping of the red channel. I'm not sure why I didn't see this in my print. I would have suspected that my printer would have had an even smaller set of reds than sRGB. Anyway, here is a repost with the reds desaturated to fit in gamut, the second catchlight removed and with detail added to the whites.

Please note, the "corrected" repost does not reflect reality. My initial posting is a better representation of the the colour I saw out in the field. Red-capped Robins (bless their little hearts) know absolutely nothing about the silly limitations of ICC profiles and our silly computer devices.