Jay

[Jonathan Ashton]

Tripod Canon 50D canon 100-400L IS @250mm ISO 500 -1.0 1/250 sec f7.1. Shot taken from a hide in the back garden.
I hope this post is successful, the website does not appear to have loaded correctly and the layout is nothing like it used to be!
All C&C welcome.

[Richard Unsworth]

Johnathan

post is fine; I too sometimes notice site behaves oddly.

Looks like this Jay brought the acorn to show you; I like the image a lot composition is excellent, though it would have been nice to see the feet too.Also head could be sharpened a little more?

thanks for sharing your garden bird shots once again


Rich

[Ben_Sadd]

Jonathan,

Another nice shot.

I downloaded it and cropped on the left halfway between leftmost ivy leaf and the next one, and removed the same amount from the top. I found it produced a more pleasing composition.

The eye would perhaps do with another round of sharpening. I find the rest of the head ok.

Had you put out acorns as bait?

[Daniel Cadieux]

Good typical "jay" pose. I just wish he'd have hopped higher to clear the feet and tail. Agree with crop suggestion, and would have physically removed the loose debris on the perch. Good BG and colours. If they are like our jays they take the bait and flee in a very quick manner. You could wedge the bait into a crevice (natural or drilled) this way it will take the jays longer to grab their prize :cool:.

[Ben_Sadd]

I also wondered about the woodchip debris and the snail shell (?). But this is probally more an issue of perch clean up in reality not in pp. Although, I would probably also try to do something in this image with the very light piece on the moss to the lower right of the ivy leaf.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Thanks for the comments, the debris was cleaned up but I did remove some from the log and then I cleaned some up in Photoshop, the snail shell is a fungus. The acorns were wedged in the log, I have more images to follow; as you may guess I have the pose but no acorn or I have the acorn but a less than ideal pose. These jays are very twitchy, they fish out the acorns in no time and can carry six or more in their crop. The trick is to be ready for when they toss their head back to reorient (is that a word?) the acorn. I will get the shot I am after...eventually.
Regards the crop, I did re-crop the image a little and I added a bit more head room - perhaps that was unnecessary?

[Stu Bowie]

The angle works well, and I like how he is showing his berry off. The perch is full of character, and if anything, I would maybe take a bit off the top of the frame.