Hi All
I am so thrilled that I managed to get an image of this bird. Savannah Sparrow is a common, widespread species found in open grasses. They tend to pop up in front of you, fly 20 - 30 feet away and dive back into the grass for cover. So they are frustrating to see, leave alone photograph. This one cooperated enough to get almost a full portrait; sans tip of tail, I'm afraid.
This is about a 2/3 crop. I did a bit of color enhancements and sharpening with PSElements 6.
You comments and suggestions are most appreciated.
Canon 40D with 500mm f/4 and 1.4x TC, f/5.6 at 1/3200, eval. metering with 0 compensation.
Thanks for looking
Gail Spitler
British Columbia Canada
agree with gus on this one! i never knew that it affected it so much, but i'd like to see the tip of the tail feathers too. that may be too picky, not sure.
Gus and Harold
Thanks for the comments. I agree about the image being a bit soft - maybe I should close down a bit rather than shooting wide open, I think the softness may be a DoF problem. I cant 'see the noise but maybe it suggests that I better start learning how to deal with RAW images and stop trying to edit jpegs. I also agree that birds with tipless tails don't make for satisfying images. Is there a tail tips r us store? :-)
gail, if the bird was 30' from you, your dof would have been about 1.2". at 20' it drops to about .3" i think it was just out of focus a tick. i dont see any one part of the bird that is more in focus than the rest.
as far as RAW. just jump in with both feet and dont worry about it. after about five minutes you will be kicking yourself for not starting sooner!!!!
Pretty little sparrow! The wetlands here have a sparrow that does the same thing, quite frustrating!!!
While I agree with Gus and Mr H I think part of the problem is the large crop which has rather messed with the detail, why not try about a 50% crop?
Hi Gail - love the background, ncie job capturing this fellow - we have similar birds here - they dart around so fast you really have to be on your toes.
Definetly use raw - I am not sure about canon - but nikon have a plugin for windows explorer so that you can view your RAW files as thunbmails in windows explorer.
Nice capture Gail. I like the pose a lot. On my monitor I also see a bunch of noise in the bg. I broke down this morning and bought Noise Ninja just to clean up the barn swallow shot. Much better than PSE 6. Another vote for RAW, gives you a lot of flexibility. Also, try the Lightroom Beta (free for 30 days).
Hi Gail You can shoot wide open and obtain a razor sharp image. The dof will be limited but sharp. The image is well exposed and in focus. The crop has reduced the quality a bit. I like the pose and eye level view !!! Might want to give more room for the bird !!!
Harold makes an excellent point about this image. The entire bird appears to be a little soft. You can get excellent sharpness at f/5.6, but not much DOF. I suspect that your focus was off ever so slightly here. Shooting RAW helps preserve detail in the dark areas of photos, particularly when you try to recover them in PP. I don't believe that RAW helps reduce BG noise in a properly exposed image such as this one. I would try another pass of USM and reduce the BG noise selectively.
Hi All
I took Doug's suggestion and did another pass at sharpening the bird and did a PSElements Noise Reduction on the background. I may have now gotten the bird into an over-sharpened condition? Also if you can, please tell me about the noise -any improvement?
With my old peepers photo is a vast improvement on original posting. Bird sharp & background very nice with no noise. Seems like those birds are on a par with our Bridled Tit mouse, dosent't sit stil for more than a second except on a feeder. Best regards to you, and my home town (Vancouver) . . . Gus :)
Savannah Sparrow
