Gray catbird

[P-A. Fortin]

Taken in obvious harsh light. Background is a bit bright but I still like it "as is" and am not sure if I should tone down the background a bit.

Canon 60D, 100-400L @ 260mm, ISO 400, 1/1600, f/6.3, manual, tripod, flash ETTL -1 2/3 with better beamer. Crop about 80%. NR and bits of sharpening in CS5. Cloned out an odd leaf on the branch. (Yes, its the same branch as the sparrow of last week. Birds seem to like this perch).

[Kerry Perkins]

Hello P-A., I don't think you have to question the background - it is too bright. Backgrounds with elements brighter than the subject are not so good. I think the foliage on the perch detracts. You could easily crop from the right, as I don't think you need as much space, and maybe try to clone out the rest. The big crop was not kind to the IQ and you can't bring out detail with sharpening that wasn't there to begin with. You did get a nice pose and good head angle, nice exposure and color. Hope you have a chance to shoot this bird in softer light.

[Bob Miller]

Hi PA.....beautiful feather detail and nice overall sharpness but the harsh light is too much! I can understand why you may still like it...its a nice pose with good sharpness....If it were mine I would tone down the brightest parts of the bg. you might try using a low opacity brush filled with a color that is closeby but darker...use the eyedropper to select!....then paint over the brightest areas with long strokes.

[P-A. Fortin]

Thanks all.

Bob: Thanks for the photoshop tip. I still have alot to discover when it comes to such adjustments.

Kerry: I think my bad habit of leaving too much space in front of the bird comes from the fact that I do not position it properly when I try to put it away from the center. For whatever reason I always try to put the head on the left when the bird is looking to the right and vice-versa. Will try to keep that in mind in the future.

80% of the original is considered a "big crop"? I mean, I still had roughly 4000x2700 pixels to work with. As for the IQ, I thought I had enough in the original file. Maybe I did something wrong in the process? Here's a 100% crop of the original, unprocessed file.

[Kerry Perkins]

P-A., there is a perennial problem on the forums in understanding what people mean by "xx% crop". My interpretation was that you cropped 80% of the image, since cropping is the act of taking away and in my mind "to crop" means to take away. If you had said "I cropped away 20% of the image" then that is unambiguous. The confusion has been made worse by the notion of "100% crop", which has come to mean "pixel for pixel on a monitor relative to the sensor", but means nothing in terms of the amount of crop. If you open an original (unscaled) image in Photoshop, set the zoom to 100%, and crop any size chunk from it, that image will be a "100% crop". It is much more understandable if you say "I cropped away 20% of the pixels" (which is what you did), or "the crop left 80% of the pixels (which is what you meant). There is pretty good detail in the original, but there could be more.

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi P-A., I'm looking at this image again and wondering if I was wrong about the sharpness. I checked out some other images online, as I am not fortunate enough to see this bird, and it seems that this is one of those birds that has an abundance of very fine plumage. What do others think?

[P-A. Fortin]

Even though it is supposed to be common here, I have seen this bird only 2-3 times so I cannot tell much more about it myself.