Indigo Bunting

[Joel Eade]

Backyard setup, very cloudy low light conditions, lucky he sat still for a few clicks
1DMKIII
300mm 2.8L + 1.4TCII
Tripod
Manual exposure
Evaluative metering
580 EXII + Better Beamer ETTL - 2 2/3 stops
iso 1000
f/4.5
1/160

ACR, CS5, Topaz Denoise, removed some branches on the left of the bird.

[Doug Brown]

Subtle use of fill flash. Nice pose from the bird, and a pretty BG. The bird looks slightly oversharpened. I would darken the perch a little, and since this is a setup I would try to get the perch in the plane of focus. A vertical crop might work nicely here.

[bhavya joshi]

Nice pose ..and BG..I think You should crop the unfocused bottom branch part..:S3:

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Joel, liked the cleanliness of this shot a lot. Very nice composition for look-back pose. The soft light has helped in bringing out the colors.

Excellent details...agree with Doug on pulling back a bit on the sharpening. I can see jagged edges to the white feathers in the wings. I've got into the habit of paying attention to such edges in USM preview. The OOF part of the perch is a bit distracting...IMO, cropping it will not hurt the balance much.

[Randy Stout]

Joel:

Nice to see that you captured one of these somewhat elusive fellows. I had one hit the feeder yesterday for about 10 seconds, not seen since.

Excellent input above. I def. agree about the oversharpening. I always watch for jaggies along the rachis of the primaries, it really seems to jump out there.

When I do a setup, I always take several shots of the perch without any birds, to confirm that it is parallel to the sensor. If not, I move it or get a different perch.

Cheers

Randy

[Arthur Morris]

Nice pose ..and BG..I think You should crop the unfocused bottom branch part..:S3:

Agree and done. Great stuff by the Mods above on the slight oversharpening. Image stood up well to my additional crop. Linear Burn on the perch using Select Color, as described in Digital Basics (https://store.birdsasart.com/shop/item.aspx?itemid=252).

[Jeff Parker]

Another vote for a bit oversharpened. Good pose and nice background. I like AM's repost with more of the perch cropped.

[Joel Eade]

Thanks all for the suggestions.....just for the record...I did have the perch turned 90 degrees to the right (ie parallell to the sensor) but a Blue Jay had landed on it and when he took off it spun the branch away from me. There were so many birds coming in I din't want to get out of my blind to re-adjust.

Thanks for the repost Artie .... looks very nice.

Joel