Singing For His Supper

[Julie Kenward]

This unlucky-in-love Robin Redbreast has been singing his heart out all spring on my front yard oak tree. Today it was overcast so I finally managed to catch him singing without the harsh sunlight that usually pokes through the leaves.

Canon 40D, EF 400mm f/5.6L
f7/1 @ 1/100th, ISO 400
Manual mode, pattern metering, handheld (braced against my car in the driveway)
Processed in ACR & CS4; cropped, levels & curves adjustments, toned down bright spots to blend in better, cloned out the bird poop on the limb.

[Randy Stout]

Jules:

Good. to see you getting your new lens going.

You obviously have worked on some of the issues with the image, but IMO, the lighting remains your biggest issue. Because of the light angle, the background is simply*too bright for the bird. Fill flash would have given you a bit more of a chance, if you have a beamer.

The HA is nice, open beak good, I like the positioning of the bird in the frame.
The perch is bigger than preferred, esp. since it blocks out the tail. Shooting angle a bit steep.

Keep working it!

Randy

[Julie Kenward]

Randy, can you elaborate a bit more on the lighting? Is it that the bird is too dark or the background is too bright or a combination?

[Randy Stout]

Jules:

I think its a combination, but the biggest item to me is the bright background, esp. left center. It immediately draws the eye, and then you wander over and see the bird. Against a darker background, the brightness of the bird might be OK.
My repost isn't a finished product, but I tried to address the major issues as I see them. I have induced a bit of halo around the bird as I lightened it, but I hope it shows the change in brightness balance between the bird and background that will help.

The crop helps reduce the impact of the background, I decreased the brightness of background, increased the bird, as well as added a smidge of contrast to the bird to compensate for the lightening.

I am doing this on my laptop, so it maybe not be exactly right, but again, hopefully it shows what I mean. You could also reduce the saturation of the background a bit, which I didn't do.

Randy

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the eye contact and calling pose and don't find the pattern of the BG too distracting. The perch is a bit large and the repost seems unbalanced to me since the 'virtual tail' is clipped. The bird looks a bit undersaturated. Since the bird is in the shade, fill flash might have helped.

[Julie Kenward]

I did try a few images with fill flash but the brighter spots really got highlighted then so I back away on it. I'll keep all this in mind and work on both this image and the future ones with these thoughts in mind.

And see...I learned its important to have the whole tail in the image! I guess I do need to hang out here more! :D;):D

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Hi Julie. To me, the bottom line is the bird and tree trunk is underexposed. Period. Increasing brightness is PS usually results in noise and poor detail. You have a dilemna here, and a very common one. Get the bird's exposure correct, and you will overexpose the background. Get the background correct, and, well, theres your image. Sorry, you can't have it both ways, at least with only one image. I'm with you on the fill-flash, there can be problems, especially with high sheen feathers or highlights that are not quite blown out, but with the flash definitely blown. However, fill-flash can be very useful, but there are limitations. My personal solution is go with the flow and go high-key. Overexpose the bird(but don't blow out the whites), and the background, already overexposed, will become a nice very graphic image like white. But some people don't care for it, and I think it is an acquired taste. There is another solution. If you use a tripod, you could take an image with the correct exposure of the bird, and after it had flown away, take another with proper exposure of the background. Pretty simple to make a composite.
regards~Bill