Bushtit

[Roy Priest]

Decided to do a little backyard setup last night. light was fading but I liked the pose on this little bustit.
Nikon D4, ISO 1000, -2/3 Ev, 1/640 @ F4, 500mm

[Ilija Dukovski]

Great pose indeed. Love the BG. If only the green branch was not there.
In any case great image.

[Ofer Levy]

Nice pose. IQ is not great - quite noisy and over-sharpened. Would re-process.

[Don Nelson]

Roy
Beautiful image of a twitchy tiny species.
I like your setup- and just how did you force it to go into a heads down/tails up pose? Great use of limited DOF.
Was there a Suet block below (that's what attracts the flocks to my feeders)?
And I agree with Ofer about noise reduction and oversharpening
Don

[Daniel Cadieux]

Neat pose for sure, those don't lastlong so you timed yourself well...or got lucky on a burst :-) Love the forked tail here, and the vertical comp is very good. Perch is OK, but I must amit that in this particualr image the mossy clump is distracting IMO. I too see the noise and aggressive sharpening...worth tweaking.

[Marina Scarr]

Absolutely killer pose and I really like your set up, moss and all. Agree on post processing issues mentioned above. I think this image can be vastly improved by starting from scratch.

[Roy Priest]

Thanks for all your critiques. I honestly don't know about the noise at I blew the image up to 200% and there was no noise at all. Maybe when I saved it as a jpeg it did something. Anyway I've taken your suggestions with the repost, how do you like this? Minimal sharpening was added

[Ofer Levy]

Repost looks much better when it comes to noise. Needs a tiny bit more sharpening and the cloning marks on the perch don't look good. I also see some posterization in the BG.

[Roy Priest]

Roy
Beautiful image of a twitchy tiny species.
I like your setup- and just how did you force it to go into a heads down/tails up pose? Great use of limited DOF.
Was there a Suet block below (that's what attracts the flocks to my feeders)?
And I agree with Ofer about noise reduction and oversharpening
Don

Don, I put up a light stand with a perch to the right of a feeder that I had set up. Just luck getting the pose, it was just getting ready to hop down to the feeder.

[Craig Brelsford]

Repost looks much better when it comes to noise. Needs a tiny bit more sharpening and the cloning marks on the perch don't look good. I also see some posterization in the BG.

Ofer sums up pretty much what I've gathered looking at this image. The image was over-sharpened before. I probably wouldn't have used F/4 at such close range; at a narrow f-stop and higher ISO (no problem at all with D4), you'd have had a sharper bushtit even before you began processing.