Northern Mockingbird

[Bill Dix]

D90; 80-400 VR @ 370mm. ISO 400. f/7.1 @ 1500s. Matrix metering @ -0.7 EV. Aperture priority. HH.

This fellow was watching me as I waited in vain for some ducks to fly by in the late afternoon sun on Christmas Eve. Sans ducks, I settled for him. I know the capture angle is steep and the perch a bit large. I took a few from further back to lessen the angle, but liked the additional detail I got on this one from close up. Almost full-frame -- cropped maybe 15% from the left for composition, and cloned out a few OOF branches on the right. C&C always welcome. [After posting, I notice that the detail is not as fine as the jpeg on my machine prior to posting. I also notice some rasterization, especially in the upper right, that is not very evident on the unposted jpeg. Any suggestions? Maybe I should run a gaussian blur on the BG?]

[Lance Peters]

Hi Bill - love the clear sharp eye and the fine details - composition works for me.
The shadows on the bird from the mixed lighting is a little distracting.
Keep em coming :)

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Bill,
I like the composition and capture, agree with Mr. Peters on the mixed lighting issue. Perhaps fill flash would have helped. I like the head angle and sharp eye contact, the color rendition is good...looking forward to your next one...:):cool:

[Oscar Zangroniz]

Excellent BG , composition and sharpness. Lance hit it with the mixed lighting.
Regards

[Craig Markham]

Hi Bill, nice sharp eye and breast feather details. You had good light direction, but that hefty perch was tilted up between the bird and the sun, casting the shadow across the bird. Some days are like that, aren't they!

I see no one has tried to address your question about the posterization you see in the BG. I suspect that the JPEG compression rate on your editing program may be set too high (this yields a smaller file size, but also a lower quality image each time you save the JPG image. To illustrate by exaggerating the effect, here's your image after I applied a large (80%) compression in a JPG save. Quite nasty:eek:! This effect will show up most in areas of an image where the gradations of tones are gradual. The greater the compression applied, the more "stepped" the tonal gradations will be. Important: this effect is cumulative each time you Open and then Save a JPEG. That's why we usually minimize open/save cycles on JPG files.

You should be able to adjust the amount of JPG compression in your program preferences. I hope this helps!
-- Craig

[Gail Spitler]

Bill and Craig - thanks for asking the question and thanks for answering it so clearly. Big help for help.
Cheers
Gail

[Bill Dix]

Thank you all for the helpful comments. Craig, I appreciate the info. I'll look into the compression settings. I believe in this case, after PP and cropping in TIFF, I converted the TIFF (3960x2640) to JPEG in one pass, using the Process Multiple Files tool in PS Elements 7.0, which I have found usually gives better results for me than the Save For Web tool (and allows me to insert the watermark as part of the process). I then opened the resultant 1024x683 JPEG for a pass of selective sharpening, and saved again. So this was only two JPEG compression cycles. But I'll experiment some more. Thanks for helping.

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Bill For saving is best to use save for web and set the size to 200kb Will give the best results !!!

The base image being at a steep angle and mixed light would always have trouble !! ... one other thing to keep in mind, for sharpening is best to do on a layer and selectively to the head area, you don't want to sharpen the bg !!!

Excellent comments Greg and love the re post !!!!!

[Bill Dix]

Thanks Alfred. I know the Save for Web @ 200kb has been recommended before, but I haven't always gotten the best results that way. I've gone back and retried that method here, this time using SFW a second time after sharpening the jpeg to make sure I optimized the posted image for 200kb. (If I just try to save the sharpened jpeg without SFW, the computer gives me an option to save at something like 162kb, or at something over 200) So in this repost, as in the OP, there have been two rounds of compression, but this one does appear better and without the rasterization of the first.

In this image, as in the OP, I selectively sharpened just the subject on a separate layer (here it was the bird and the perch), and ran NR on the background on a separate layer.

Thanks as always for the helpful advice.