List life Addition - Black-throated Trogon

http://i153.photobucket.com/albums/s...atedTrogon.jpg

I created this image last month in the heat and humidity of a jungle night (flashlight) walk at the La Tirimbina Reserve in Costa Rica. We were looking for creepy crawlies like spider, ants, lizards, frog, snakes etc. and we found them all.

Our guide had asked that only one person in our group take flash assisted shots so as not to disturb the animals too much. I was given the honours since I carried my Canon 40D, Sigma 100mm F 2.8 Macro and Sigma Super 500D flash (with a home made soft diffuser). I had to get my colleagues to shine a flashlight or two on each subject to allow me to focus on the subject, in the otherwise pitch black jungle, before each shot.

One of our friends spotted this beautiful male Black-throated Trogon sleeping high in a tree. I couldn't leave the trail (vipers scorpions etc.) and I didn't have a long lens for the reach I would normally have wanted but I was still happy to create this image of a life list addition.

The image is cropped to about 25% of full frame. Perhaps my crop has the bird too centered in the frame?

Exposure - 1/200 seconds, F11, ISO 640, Flash - Flash fired, Compulsory flash mode, FocalLength - 105 mm

Sounds like pretty difficult circumstances. Exposure looks good and I don't mind the bird being relatively centered. It would have been great to see more of the head and I would run NR on the BG.

Sounds like a great night!! Superb colors and details for those circumstances!! Congrats!

Thank you Axel and David. I agree about wanting to see more of the head but the bird had been sleeping. Fortunately it opened its eyes long enought for me to capture this image. I'll see about using some NR onthe background.

As above plus I think that this would benefit from having the yellows de-SATed a bit.

Thank you Artie. I've tried to decrease the noise in the BG and reduce the saturation of the yellow. Desaturating individual colours is new to me so hopefully I haven't gone too far.

Hi Stephen, The noise looks better. Not sure what you did to the yellows but you made it worse...

For the repost I added blue to the yellows in Selective Color, then selected only the yellow with Select/Color Range, and then reduced the yellow SAT 15 points....

Let me know how it looks.

Thanks very much Artie. As I mentioned I don't really have experience in individual colour manipulation. I'll read up on this.