Pine Grosbeak in a blizzard

[Charles Daigle]

Today we had a wicked snow storm. I bundled up with a bunch of layers and my camo snow suit and headed out to my back yard feeders. Many different birds showed up, but this is one of my favorites of the day. I really tested the 1D2N and 500/4 IS today and they carried on without an issue. After 3 hours outside, the lens and camera were completely covered in snow and ice.

For this shot, I had my face shoved in the snow supporting the lens/camera on my knee.

1D2N
500/4IS @ f8
eV=+1.7
1/1600
ISO800

Thanks for looking!

[Satish Ranadive]

Beautiful shot of cross beak.I like the alert pose in snow fall.Nice BG and FG.

Regards,
Satish.

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Charles,

Now that's how you get out in the elements to get the shot! It must have been tough shooting through the snow, and you can see a bit of a "haze" effect. I like it for a photo like this one. The alert pose is an added bonus, too.

Miguel

[Karl Egressy]

Great effort to get low. Nice low anle shot, really showing the condition you and the bird had to face.

[nick clayton]

I like the plain background the snow gives which makes the bird stand out and the OOF snow at the bottom. The bird has a nice pose but could do with turning it's head slightly towards you Charles.

[Matthew Studebaker]

beautiful mood with the white fading at the bottom of the frame. I'm seeing a lot of pixels in the bird itself. Maybe just save it at a higher jpg quality?

[Charles Daigle]

Thanks everyone for commenting. I have a few more that I will post in the upcoming days.

beautiful mood with the white fading at the bottom of the frame. I'm seeing a lot of pixels in the bird itself. Maybe just save it at a higher jpg quality?

This file was pushed pretty hard. Even though I had +1.7eV, I still had to bring it up another +0.7. For the 2N, I am quite pleased with these results :-)

[Daniel Cadieux]

Going out in such conditions really is rewarding when you come back with good stuff!! Your bravery of the elements allowed you to pot this beautiful Pine Grosbeak and the low angle gave you a dreamy scene with all the snow. Yes, a better HA would have been great, and I do feel the image needs more punch to it. Also, if you look around the bird's head (especially the bill) you'll find what may look like resizing compression artifacts..this has reduced the overall detail quality of your image IMO...

[Charles Daigle]

Daniel, photobucket has recently undergone some significant "renovations" and the image quality seem to have taken a LARGE hit. I always export from ACR @ 12 inch by 8 inch resolution, and let photobucket resize for WEB. Historically, this has proven effective but it looks like they are going towards looking like facebook more and more....I will try and re-host on my flickr account and see how it works. I have over 10k files stored on my photobucket (at full res), so I'm sortof stuck in between losing all my full res images and starting somewhere else...

Thank you very much for the critique. It was VERY rewarding to get some useful images out of the storm. The grosbeak only stayed for about 5 seconds, so this was the best HA possible :-) The contrast of the image was boosted quite a bit to get through the snow, so I don't know how much further I can push the file.

Thanks!!!

Charles

[Daniel Cadieux]

Thanks for the info Charles, that could very well be the reason....