Hairy woodpecker

In a local heavily wooded area. The light was poor, I had no tripod with me, and I got this one image by bracing the lens against the nearest tree-trunk before the bird flew off.

D300, 300 f/4 AF-S + 1.4TC. ISO1000, 1/80, f/6.3. Pattern metering, no flash.

I blurred the bg using Noise Ninja, added some noise to the black on the bird's back to introduce a little detail, and adjusted the wb. Then sharpened the bird using usm. I hope the blurred branches and light reflections in the bg aren't too distracting. The original was a horizontal image, so I did a vertical crop, but couldn't downsize the bird at all as it was so close.

Richard

Tough light as you stated and I'm not sure I understand intorducing noise to show some detail in the dark feathers...to me it looks like specks or basically noise. Maybe I'm missing something? I do like the composition and the sft background texture.

Richard,

Not sure adding noise will emulate natural details of the bird. Like the composition.

Tough exposure on this bird with all the backlighting, good job on the background, not sure I would have added noise, maybe I'd run despeckle a few times on the back, but thats just me...TFS

Good composition. Like that you are at near eye level. Detail in breast looks good. I agree w above, don't care for the added noise. Might darken the BG a lillte. fill flash would probably helped

Relatively sharp with a very nice image design as presented but it looks as if the only thing that adding noise to the black feathers did was introduce tiny green dots, i.e., noise.... Just a bit short on the head angle too.

I congratulate you for having the guts to shoot at ISO 1000 with a D300. I have a D300 and rarely shoot above ISO 800. The speckles on the back of the woodpecker are a real problem. At first I thought they were an unfortunate part of the original shot. Good to hear that you introduced them. I'd like to see this shot cropped a little looser and without the speckles.