Carolina Chickadee

[Bob Decker]

I was walking in the house from my morning walk and this guy was just ignoring my presence. I had to back-up to get focus on the bird. Hand-held, 40D, Bigma @ 500mm, iso 800, 1/160, f/10, Av mode @ +33, 580EX II w/ BB @ -1.0. There was a second limb running below and parallel to his perch + a bright green leaf in the lower RH corner that I cloned out. RAW conversion via ACR, unsharp mask applied to the bird, noise reduction on the background in PS.

[ChasMcRae]

I like the perch,background and breast look.
I am not a hard and fast HA person always ,but would have preferred it to be either straight at me down the beak or profile or slight turn profile.
They are fidgety little creatures and good to get a nice tight portrait in the setting.

[Lance Peters]

Hi Bob - looks like the point of focus may not have been on the head/eye area - looks a little soft compared to other parts. Exposure and Flash use looks good - Like the BG.
A little too in your face for my personal tastes - a little further back in the frame would have been good.
P.S. work looks good.
Good show :)

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Bob Amazingly sharp for the shutter speed !!! Would take my chances wide open and having more shutter speed. Image looks just a little soft and dof wise there is no way to cover the eyes and beak at that angle.

Would try multiplying the whites by the beak, perhaps exp at zero would have been better .. Pleasing image and not an easy bird, all little guys give me trouble :)

[Anita Rakestraw]

Very nice comp, Bob, how nice that he was cooperative! Maybe just a tad more on the sides if you have it. I hope you don't mind; I downloaded your image to see if I could make some improvements. You have some nice detail in the whites which can be brought out by selecting and lowering the highlights. I applied some high pass sharpen on the bird only, and spot-sharpened the beak and eye. Cleaned up some signs of cloning below the branch and to the right side.

[Bob Decker]

You have some nice detail in the whites which can be brought out by selecting and lowering the highlights.


Hi Anita. I'm not sure I'm familar with how you did that... could you explain in a bit more detail? I like the detail you found, just not 100% sure how you did it.

Thanks.



Hi Bob Amazingly sharp for the shutter speed !!! Would take my chances wide open and having more shutter speed.


Alfred, I was pretty suprised when I looked at the data and saw how slow the shutter speed was. This was very much a "shot from the hip" kind of situation. I was carrying the camera in and really didn't get a chance to think about changing settings from where it alread was. It was very much a "look at that bird... snap, snap... gone." Not a huge amount of time to look around at settings in the viewfinder and think. ;)

[Anita Rakestraw]

Bob, I work in PSPX2 instead of Photoshop, so you might have to make adaptions . But I used the magic wand to select the whites I wanted to darken, and used Shadows/Highlights. I set shadows and midtones to 0, highlights to -40 or -50 (don't recall, sorry.)

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Bob,
Good advise given and techs. covered. I like the close up in your face look and the diagonal perch...looking forward to your next one...:cool:

[Bob Decker]

I tried to apply some of the suggestions... tweaked the whites for more detail... expanded the canvas a bit on the LH side, did some more sharpening. Hopefully it's an improvement.