Back Lit Cardinal

[Ed Cordes]

I kind of like this back lit effect. What do you think?

1DMK2 with 500 f4 and 1.4 TC. Evaluative metering at ISO 800 with EV at 0 and fill flash at EV - 1 2/3. f 5.6 and 1/500 due to losing light fast! Cropped a bit. I desaturated the reds a little.

Thanks for looking. C&C welcome.

[Ilija Dukovski]

I like the backlight, the perch and the bird are excellent. The pose and HA too, good looking bird.
I think you oversaturated the red a bit, also oversharpened. The combo I think produced patches of flat red.
They will probably go away if you back-up a bit with the sat and sharpening. If the reds are overexposed I'd try to recover them in ACR too first.

[Don Lacy]

Hi Ed, I brought the image into PS and the red channel does show some clipping all you need is to tone down the red a bit.

[Harshad Barve]

nice compo , lovely backlit, nice perch and good looking bird , I dont know about species , so cant say on saturation
TFS

[Leo Berzins]

I like the backlighting, Ed, and the pose and background.
If it were mine, though, I would clone out the stub on the perch below the bird's belly.

[Kiran Poonacha]

One more Vote for cloning out hat stub, the back lit effect sure works well, the pose and BG add too.. congrats..

[Erich Stevens]

I can appreciate the difficulty in getting a shot like this. In my experience, cardinals rarely stay still for more than a second or two, and when they do their crest is usually in the down position. Good work!