American Goldfinch

[Dan Brown]

Another from my setup in the backyard. The BG is still a problem but with this one, I will have to like it:c3:. About a 30% crop here. C&C welcome.

Camera Model: NIKON D300, tripod
Shutter speed: 1/320 sec
Aperture: 8
Exposure mode: Av
Exposure compensation: +1/2
Flash: Optional,TTL, -2 stops
Metering mode: Multi-segment
ISO: 800
Focal length: 400mm f3.5
Focal length: 600mm (in 35mm film)
AF mode: MANUAL

[Karl Egressy]

The picture has beautifu colours in the background.
I like the pattern too.
The bird hans nice looking back pose and the perch is sweet.

[jack williamson]

The goldfinch looks pretty good, maybe just a little more contrast on the bird. I like perch but the flowers are too bright. The colors in the BG are great but your lens bokeh created the circular shapes ( like mine does with bright highlights in the BG)

Jack

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Dan, I like the image design and the bokeh...am a fan of this kind of bokeh. very nice. nice head turn and composition. the flowers are a little too bright I think. If mine, I'd do minor cropping from top and bottom.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Dan, I really like the setting in this. Good pose from the goldfinch, and I like the colours on him. I feel your BG is great as it is multi coloured and all the colours blend in together. I do find the overall image a touch bright, and as I liked this so much, Im posting my version - hope you dont mind. Just a few tweaks. I took this into RAW, brought down the exposure slider, enough to show detail in the flowers. As I did that, it created a blue cast on the whites of the flowers. I then desaturated the cyan channel to get them back to white. ( I did this over the entire image, as cyan didnt affect any of the other colours )Then a multiply blending mode at 20%.

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Dan, here's my repost. some cropping( apologies abt losing your watermark), some selective sharpening, some color cast work, darkening of shadows( shud have exlcuded some parts of the BG in that), darkening of highlights.....and some eye doctor...which can be done much better on large sized file than what I have done.

109955

[Dan Brown]

Thanks for the great help, guys! The flowers are quite bright (probably not the best choice for the setup, making thing harder to PP!). I like the crop and tweaks you've preformed, Kaustubh and I also like the flowers in Stuart's repost! I need to combine the two ideas into one final product!