Red-winged Blackbird Staredown

[Jeff Dyck]

Here's a shot from this afternoon, taken from the car window in the drizzle. While not exactly my idea of choice conditions for photography, the "big softbox effect" does work pretty well with those black birds...

Canon 5DII -- Canon 800mm f/5.6L IS -- 1/500s @ f5.6 -- ISO400 -- Manual Exposure

92960

[Randy Stout]

Jeff:

Soft light is def. the key with a black bird and those red epaulets that are very easily blown.

Excellent display of the epaulets here, intense down the barrel stare, sharp.

My work monitor tends to be a bit hot, so take that into consideration, but I am not seeing a lot of detail in the reds, esp. the birds left wing.

Might be worth desatting the reds slightly, or doing a linear burn on the epaulets.

The perch makes for some interesting compositional choices. Unless you were to remove the right side of the fork, I think this is a good choice compositionally.

Cheers

Randy

[Stu Bowie]

Jeff, the soft light certainly has brought out the blacks nicely, and I like the head on stare from the starling. I like these pastel coloured BG's, and would maybe tone down the perch a tad.