Common Yellowthroat in Habitat

[Richard Stern]

Hi,

I think this is a young male, as it has a trace of black emerging around the throat. I cropped this the way it is because I wanted to keep the rather tropical feel of the picture, and wanted the seed pod thing in the bottom left corner left in. Plus I didn't want to crop the bird so much that the image quality was degraded. I cloned out some oof leaves near the bird to isolate it, and applied nr and gaussian blur to some of the dark areas.

Olympus OM-D EM5, Panasonic 100-300 M4/3 lens, hand-held,

1/640. f/5.6, ISO 500, EV-1.3, pattern metering. One advantage of the M4/3 system is that there is a live histogram in the EVF, and I can adjust the exposure up or down on the fly till the main subject is correctly exposed.

All comments re: the composition, iq or anything else welcome.

Richard

[gail bisson]

This is really nice Richard.
I like the curve of the perch and love the seed pod.
I like the dark BG as well.
IQ is really good as well. I see a hint of a magenta cast ( really visible on branch and beak)but that is an easy fix in color balance.
My only suggestion would be to add a bit more canvas at the top but only if it is the same clean dark uncluttered green,
Gail

[John Chardine]

Hi Richard- Although messy, I like the environment you have included here. The pod is great- it's a Wild Cucumber, Echinocystis lobata. The issue I have with the image is that there is clear use of noise reduction on the subject. This gives the feathers a waxy appearance. I steer well clear of this or do it extremely gently on bird feathers because the spatial frequency of the noise and the feather detail is similar enough that when you reduce one you reduce the other. Am I off-base here?

[Richard Stern]

Hi John,

I used noise reduction on the background but as far as I can recall not on the bird (I didn't keep the psd file with all the history and layers, so I can't be sure of that). Actually, that's an unusual comment for my images, as many of those I post in the Avian forum are critiqued as being too noisy!

I don't think any in-camera nr would apply to raw file, and I don't use it anyway - I prefer to do my adjustments in pp.

Thanks for looking,

Richard

[P-A. Fortin]

I'm not good enough with pp to explain issues, but I think I can see what John means. The bird feathers seems to lack detail for a bird that seems to be in perfect focus. Maybe some more sharpening on the bird?

I love the bird pose and the habitat shot. The inclusion of the "cucumber" really makes it special. I'm with Gail on this one and would like to add a bit of canvas on the top. I would not have noticed if she had not mentioned it, but now I do also see the slight magenta cast.

Very interesting image.

[John Chardine]

Hi John,

I used noise reduction on the background but as far as I can recall not on the bird (I didn't keep the psd file with all the history and layers, so I can't be sure of that). Actually, that's an unusual comment for my images, as many of those I post in the Avian forum are critiqued as being too noisy!

I don't think any in-camera nr would apply to raw file, and I don't use it anyway - I prefer to do my adjustments in pp.

Thanks for looking,

Richard

Hi Richard- It would be instructive to see just the bird with no processing. I'm keen to try to diagnose what I am seeing.

[Richard Stern]

Hi John,

Here's the image cropped from the original raw file in LR, but no other pp applied at all. Looking at the bird (and ignoring the other pp-ing I did), I can now see what you mean, and I think I must have applied nr or something to the bird in the original post. Further comments welcome!

Thanks,

Richard