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Eastern Spinebill and honey-bee at the pool
The Eastern Spinebill is a member of the honey-eater family. They love to dive into the water and bounce right out, all in a few tenths of a second. They seem to delight in making as big a splash as possible and dive in repeatedly until thoroughly wet, then retreat to a safe branch for a long preening session. The bird in the image has just emerged from the water and is on the way up, sharing the airspace with a honey-bee which came to the pool for a drink. This is another capture in our garden using the high-speed multiple synchronized flash set-up described previously.
Canon 5DIII + 300 mm f/2.8L II + 1.4x III extender, three 600EX-RT flash units, RS-80N3 remote shutter release, 3532LS Gitzo tripod, Kirkphoto King Cobra gimbal.
Pre-set manual focus, manual camera settings, f/14, 1/200 sec, ISO 125, 1/8 flash power.
Processed in DPP4: adjust shad/h'lights (+1,-1), saturation (+1), luminance NR (0), chrominance NR (2), sharpness (3), crop, RAW-TIFF. PS Elements: select bird and bee, surface blur background to reduce file size, remove two flash h'lights from bird's eye, downsize, sharpen, TIFF-JPEG.
1 Attachment(s)
Eastern Spinebill and honey-bee at the pool
Thanks everyone for your generous feedback and helpful advice on this image. One of the points of interest is the oof bee that Shawn amusingly suggested had "photo-bombed" the shot. I was in two minds about including the bee and I probably should have removed it before posting. However, today I decided to select the bee and play around with a few sharpening options and was surprised to find that the 'remove lens blur' and 'remove Gaussian blur' tools in PS were reasonably effective, though not perfect. In this repost you can see the improvement although probably not quite enough to save the bee. Cheers, Ian.