Eastern Kingbird

[Edward Arthur]

Nothing really special here, Kingbirds like to pose. I just liked how it how it turned out the way I saw it in the finder, clean and even.



Canon 6D
Zeiss 80-200mm + 2x TC @400mm
1/3200 f/5.6 ISO 1250
Handheld and manual focus
My standard LR5 tweaks for highlights/shadows/blacks/whites
Topaz Denoise, sharpened using deconvolution

[David Kenny]

Nice. Sharp and clean. I Would prefer if the bird was not looking away but we cant control that. Did you add canvass to the right side of the frame? Not sure if it is my monitor but I see a vertical line in the background to the right of where the perch ends and I see a strange unnatural shape in the bottom right corner.

Dave

[Edward Arthur]

Thanks for the feedback, Dave. No added canvas here, just a 50% crop. I now see a small area in the lower right corner where I clone-stamped the BG a bit to even it out. There was no other cloning, etc.

I have shots from the same session with better head angle. Unfortunately the light wasn't favorable and the bird's face was cast in deep shadow when the head angle was best. I'm not very skilled in post at bringing out detail when blacks are in shadow. What I valued more here was the evenly lit face/body and nice catchlight in the eye this angle produced.

[John Goldman]

Nice sharp simple well exposed capture.
The perch leads the viewer directly to the bird. I'll chime in also that I prefer some slight head turn toward the camera. Sometimes you just have to talk to these birds with more authority in your voice. :-)

[Tim Harding]

I like the clean simple look. Nice detail in the bird. I find that often you can get the bird to turn its head a bit toward you by making any kind of quiet little noise - like a pish or click of the tongue. After you have your safety shots of course.

[Diane Miller]

Lovely shot!! Great light, tonalities, lovely perch and BG, sharp and detailed. I don't mind the head turn -- not every shot can be identical!

I'm not sure what you mean by sharpening by deconvolution. There has been mention of it in earlier threads, but I've never managed to follow through on it. Any improvement in sharpening is worth knowing about.

[Edward Arthur]

Thank you all for the input, much appreciated.

Diane, deconvolution (I just like saying/writing the word - lol) is simply another sharpening method used in various imaging products. In this case I used Focus Magic. Sometimes I get better results than with the sharpening in PS, depends on the image. I need all the help I can get. :)

[Diane Miller]

Most of us need all the help we can get! I downloaded teh trial for Focus Magic and it looks like a very good product. I'll buy it when the trial (10 images) expires). Like noise reduction, it's good to have several choices. Some work better than others on certain images.

Thanks for the information!