Woody Woodpecker

[John Chardine]

Captured this image of a male Pileated Woodpecker today near Pocologan, New Brunswick. It gave it's characteristic call as it sat on the dead Elm tree. He must be starting to think about breeding.

40D, 100-400mm @ 400mm. 1/2000s, F6.3, ISO 640. DFine noise reduction. 25% crop.

[Maxis Gamez]

Hi John,

The dry trees in the top left are some what distracting. The composition does not work for me as the bird is looking to a "wall" if you will. I would also add more sharpening to bring more details out!

Keep them coming.

[Fabs Forns]

Hi JOhn, nce high key background. Wish the bird had a little more detail in the plumage. The OOF branches don't bother me.

[Don Lacy]

I am also fine with OOF branches, but have to agree with more detail and sharpening of the Pileated, still better then any thing I have of this species.

[John Chardine]

Many thanks for all the comments. I've attempted a bit more sharpening and cropped a bit.

I am fighting the pretty heavy crop to begin with. As someone mentioned the other day, the 100-400 works well at about 25 feet or less range. This makes sense for the average size of objects we photograph. I was a lot further away from the Pileated than that. I find I am pushing the distance and cropping envelope these days because we are still in the midst of winter and the bird pickings are pretty slim. If I had the 500F4 (dream!), doing this would not have so many consequences.

[paul leverington]

Woody Woodpecker actually was a redheaded woodpecker.

[Steve Foss]

John, I like the shot.

You might go back to the original crop and use shadows/highlights in photoshop to bring out feather detail in the blacks. A lot of noise reduction softwares seem to turn things waxy or make them look painted on, and that might be costing you detail in the blacks, too.

Woody the Woodpecker was not modeled after the red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus), but after either the pileated (Dryocopus pileatus) or the ivory-billed (Campephilus principalis). There is some debate on which of the latter two inspired Woody, but most sources attribute his inspiration to the pileated.

[John Chardine]

Thanks Steve. You are right about the noise reduction. I'll go back to the original raw and see what's there. Thanks also for the confirmation of the species that Woody Woodpecker was modeled after. I didn't rally think too much about this when I typed in the subject line to the original post.

[Steve Foss]

John, it may be a six-of-one, half-dozen-of-the-other situation with shadows/highlights. The more detail you bring up in the shadows, the more you see noise and the more you want to eliminate it. If your NR program has iso profiles for your camera, that's good. I use noise ninja and download all the iso profiles for the camera bodies I've used so I can have the program run a better profile without a lot more work.

Also, I'm pretty big on selective sharpening. Particularly when the bird's body is dark and the head is light to medium tone, I'll lasso the head and sharpen it without sharpening the body. Then I may even lasso the eye and give it another bump in sharpening, depending on how it looks. The head is generally the focal point of any viewer, with the eye being the spot on the spot of viewer focus.