Hermit Thrush at stream

[Michael Henry]

Canon 50D
500 mm @ 4.5
ISO 800
1/200 with fill flash at -2
+1/3 EC
This hermit thrush has been coming to our backyard stream late in the afternoon. First post. All comments welcome
Thank you

[Ray Rozema]

Exposure looks good. Pose and eye contact very good. The posterior part of the bird is soft, suspect it was out of the DOF Based on the rock that it is standing on, it appears the DOF extends forward from the bird which raises the question was the point of focus little closer to the camera than the face of the bird. The DOF should have been deep enough. Curious what others think.

[Julie Kenward]

First, let's talk about composition. You've got the bird in the center of the frame both vertically and horizontally. If you recropped this and put the bird lower in the frame (taking some off the bottom) and more to the right (taking some off the right side) I think you'd have a much stronger image.

I'm struggling a bit with how much is going on in this image. The main problem for me is that the bird's head is almost the same color/tone as the rock behind it. If you could get him so his head and body were in the darker (water) area then I think he'd really pop. As is, he seems to get a little bit lost there. You do have a very nice HA and even a bit of a catch light in his eye from the flash.

The other thing I'm wondering about, Michael, is that part of the bird seems razor sharp and then right next to that area it really gets blurry. Did you do any noise reduction that would account for this? Any idea why he's so sharp in the eye and beak and then right behind the head and down onto his side it's so blurry? Something just doesn't feel right...any idea what it could be?

[John Chardine]

Michael- This is a lovely image. I really like the way it shows the bird in a habitat, albeit a garden habitat! The image is sharp where it needs to be, although I too am a bit confused about the flanks, which seem softer than they should be )almost like a blur tool was run over the area, which I'm sure you didn't do!). I would consider a couple of post-processing edits: 1. removal of the flash catchlight in the eye (with some lightening of the natural highlight in the eye), and 2. toning down/cloning of the two white objects in the BG, UL and UR. Nicely done overall though!

[Michael Henry]

Thank you all for the comments. I think the softness of the flanks may be due to some noise reduction I used in LR3. I went back and used less with a little more sharpening and it looks better.