En garde!

Paul Burdett's recent post of a New Holland Honeyeater from my home state (Tasmania, Australia) inspired me to show this additional view of this eye-catching species. These photogenic birds are quite common in Tasmania and southern coastal zones of the Australian mainland, and to me they are one of the most striking of Australia's honeyeaters. They are feisty, and will often robustly protect a flowering shrub that they claim as their personal 'feed tree'. I've often thought that their characterful behaviour fits appropriately with their Gaulish moustaches!

Location: South Bruny Island, southern Tasmania

Equipment: Canon 7D, EF 100-400mm L IS MkI zoom at 400mm, handheld, 1/500 sec, f/6.3, ISO 400

Processing: Adobe CC Lightroom/Photoshop, noise reduction with Neat Image plugin. Some distracting elements in the background were addressed using modified luminosity masks and selective blur.

Comments and suggestions welcome,
Cheers, David

Beautiful bird on a fantastic perch. Nice job with your cloning in the background. The image would be more engaging if the head were turned a few degrees towards us as opposed to away from us. You need to tweak the processing a bit as you are about .5 stops under exposed. I would lift the shadows a touch as well and reduce the saturation of the image a few points. Minor processing tweaks will help overall presentation.

Not sure which is more spectacular, the bird or the row of pink whatever-they-ares near the breast. The leaf that intersects the tail bugs me a bit.

No flash?

with love, artie

Bird and perch are equally great! I wish for a bit more eye contact but you' can't do anything about that now. I'm not sure if too much NR was applied,
but there is a some sort of thing processing halo/outline around things, particularly the pink flowers right of the bird. There also seems to be a loss
of feather detail which suggest too much smoothing out. Same goes for the underside of the leaves on the plant. They look a bit plastic....

Thanks for taking the time for feedback Isaac, Artie and Dorian, much appreciated.

For Isaac: I will have a go at tweaking exposure, shadows and saturation, and repost. Exposure looks OK on my screen when using my general web viewing calibration setting which is sRGB, Gamma 2.2 and Intensity 160 cd/m2 (I have other calibrated presets for various processing purposes etc.). That Intensity may be a bit high compared to what some people have their displays set to most of the time and may have lead to the underexposed look - it is difficult to know what to use for a general across-the-board web setting to allow for multiple viewer setups. Feel free to share any thoughts you may have.

For Isaac and Dorian: RE. the head angle, I sometimes feel that providing the bird is not turned away from me, if it is concentrating on something other than the photographer it can tend to look more natural (i.e. my presence has not disturbed its behaviour). I also thought this one was a complement to Paul's post in showing the almost full side profile of this species.

For Artie: The flowering shrub is an Australian native Grevillea species which the honeyeaters love. No flash used on this shot, the natural light was pretty good and the eye highlight is natural.

For Dorian: This one was processed using a workflow that I have since mostly replaced with one substituting Canon DPP4 for Lightroom, which seems to lessen the tendency to halos. Also, in my older workflow I was not usually doing NR work separately on the bird and background, and in this case backing off the NR on the bird may have retained more detail. I should have another go at this image using my updated process, but it would mean having to redo the background processing which got a bit involved. One point of note though, the leaves on this species of Grevillea do actually have a somewhat stiff, 'plastic' texture so the look there may not be a processing artifact.

This is all just train of thought so any further input welcome - this is the best learning site I have so go for it!

Cheers,
David

Good detail on the face and eye, typical native habitat for this species. Thanks for sharing.

I am very late to the party here but I echo the HA issue and the slight halo around the back of honeyeater. Isaac has given you great advice as have the others.
Your cloning work looks great and I would never have known that the BG was changed.
Lovely photo! Well done,
Gail

Hi David,
I'm jealous that you live in Hobart! I really like the photo, but agree with the other comments. However, the colours/exposure look great on my screen.
Cheers,
Paul

Thanks Paul, I'm probably equally envious of the incredible variety of birds you get up there in Queensland, and hope to get a decent birding trip there at some stage. Down here in Tasmania we look forward to the annual seasonal migration visits from your Satin Flycatchers, one of my favourite birds but still to get a photo of them that I'm really happy with (I have one older post on this forum but the image has a number of problems). Since my original post of the New Holland Honeyeater I have noticed that on the thumbnails page view of the Avian forum, this one does indeed look a bit darker than the recent average, so I will still generate another exposure and shadow adjusted re-post as soon as I get time (been having a too-frantic week, so perhaps by the weekend).

Cheers, David

Hi David,
I guess we always want what we don't have. I love the Tassy climate and landscapes there. Not looking forward to another hot summer here. I'm happy that I got the Forty spotted Pardalote whilst at Inala on Bruny. During the three hour guided bird walk I also got some endemics, but it wasn't until the last hour of our last day that I got a Pink Robin. My best Flame Robins were half way up Mt Wellington...something "springs"...can't remember...but a great location. If you get to Brisbane maybe we could do a bird walk together...I'm a retired teacher so no time restrictions. Looking forward to your repost of the Honeyeater. Cheers.

As promised, here's a revised image with adjustments to curves, shadows and saturation as suggested by Isaac. I hope it's enough of an adjustment, looks OK on my screen:

Attachment 177922

Also, for Isaac and Dorian, after reading some of the extended discussions about head angle from Artie and others on this website, I'm more convinced of the importance of it from a purely photographic point of view (thanks Artie, very interesting discussions and interesting what a difference a tiny amount of HA makes). Not always possible to have the control at the time in the field of course (my Honeyeater was only fleetingly on the perch), but it is something to remember to think about in the field.

Thanks again everyone for helpful feedback, I'm still a relative newbie to Avian and grateful for any advice I can get.

Cheers, David

Hi David et. al.,

First off, the head angle here is pretty good, not perfect but not bad. Secondly, the key thing is to be aware of it in the field, to press the shutter button when you have a decent head angle. In most cases we have no control over head angle. But, if you have a gorgeous bird who is looking away, you might try a gentle squeak to get it to look at you. Many times that will work perfectly. At other times the bird might get pissed off and fly to Connecticut. Or New Zealand.

Head Angle Fine Points is a very old thread. But for those who really want to learn there is ample opportunity to study. It has more than 70,000 views. You can access it here on BPN.

with love, artie