Theme: Meadowlark Singin' in the Spring

[Bill Dewey]

Week before last this Meadowlark sat singing away for over 2 minutes straight. What a wonderful song they have.



Nikon D7200, f8, 1/2000, 800mm. Cropped and selectively sharpened. Wish I had the audio to attach.

[Satish Ranadive]

Bill,
Wonderful singing pose you have captured here on natural stage.
I like the composition.
Yellows on chest and throat looks bit bright to me. I have edited your image,hope you don't mine.
Reduced the brightness and applied NR to BG.



Regards,
Satish.

[Bill Dewey]

Thanks, Satish, and no problem on the edit, that is what this place is for, correct? One of the tricky things is trying to be true to colors, and that is so often up to perception. In this case it was bright sun, just about 30-40 minutes after sunrise, and the bird is facing East, so the full morning sun is shining right on the Meadowlark making the colors really bright. So in this case while it could be toned down a bit, your rendition would not reflect the early morning bright sun. On the background, you are spot on, and I should have noticed that. I will go back and look at my PP steps, apparently I did something globally that I should not have done. Those expanses of blue seem to often cause issues. Thank you very much for pointing that out to me, much appreciated.

[William Dickson]

Nice looking image Bill. Great colours on the bird and a lovely singing pose. I think somewhere between the original post and the repost by Satish would be better. Nice work and thanks for sharing.

Will

[Karl Egressy]

Nice pose captured, Just out of interest what 800 mm lens did you use.

[Bill Dewey]

Thanks, Will. It is always a challenge trying to determine what the "real" color is/was, I guess I need to take a picture to remind me I may do a bit more playing around, worst thing that will happen is I will decide that you folks were right!!!! Oh, what a shock THAT would be, eh? Funny thing, when I have done shoots for NFL teams, major college as well, it is a big no-no to touch the color, as those are all copyrighted, so the organizations will determine what the REAL color is, no matter what the photographer OR the picture claims "as truth".

Thanks again for the kind words, much appreciated.

[Bill Dewey]

Thanks, Karl. You should always be able to check the EXIF in my images, I don't strip it, although sometimes it lies. In this case this is a Nikon 400mm f2.8 AFS Version 1 lens, vintage 2000, plus the TC-20EIII teleconverter. Cheap guys 800mm f5.6 lens. I actually did some testing at this same location with this same bird stacking my 1.4TC on as well for some extreme focal length. This was also shot on a DX body.

Thanks again, much appreciated.

Oh, before I forget, if folks examine EXIF on many of my images it will show 950mm, which is rather a strange number when you consider this is the 400 plus the 1.7 tc, which should be 680 if my math is correct. Problem is that the TC-17E came out well after this lens, and Nikon has no intention of doing a modification for this old lens so it reports correctly with the 1.7. It is correct with the 1.4 and 2.0.

[Gerald Kelberg]

Hi Bill, good to meet you on here. Love the posture and the sheer gusto that this little meadowlark is putting out.

If this was mine, I'd probably go back to the original file and try to tame the yellows a bit in conversion (DPP4 is my choice) - the fact that you are missing plumage detail in the yellow bits suggests that something isn't quite right and your yellows are over-saturated. Alternatively, you might find it easier to make a targeted adjustment to the yellow saturation in Photoshop. In my opinion, the Brightness is OK, so I wouldn't change that.

It is helpful if you do give some details of your post processing regime in your posts so that you can get more useful feedback from all the folks on the forum - it is a great place to learn!

Best wishes, Gerald

PS. I think you will find that Meadowlarks do have an exclusive copyright on their colours and patterns.

[Shawn Zierman]

Love this species song! Carries quite a ways in those open spaces they frequent....memorable. I like the simple clean image design...prefer the original to the repost, but agree that the yellows could be mellowed, and some noise reduction selectively applied to the sky portion...at least for web presentation, is worth considering. How much of a crop, if any?

[Bill Dewey]

Thanks, Gerald, very nice meeting all of you as well, and thank you all for the great suggestions. I have gone back to the original an "tamed down" that copyrighted yellow a bit. Tough to do in DPP4 as I use a Nikon and if memory serves that would be like trying to edit a CR2 in NXD So, I used a combination of LR6, adjustment brush, OnOne and NIK, with a touch of Polarization and a Lighten Center Darken Edges filter from NIK, one of my favorites. The recommendations to do this were spot on, and I think they helped with some feather texture. I did not de-saturate the yellow, as I had added no saturation, but I think that toning down the intensity has helped. I don't think I got the crop exact, but close.

Latest version:

[Bill Dewey]

Thank you very much Shawn. You are sure correct on how far the song carries, which is often very frustrating. At times I will be driving, here one signing, stop and can't find the darned thing, or if I do it seems to be miles away.

As to the crop, here is the SOOC original for comparison, I do like these high-megapixel cameras, having 24MP to work with sure beats the old days. Were I to print this, I would most like upsize with Perfect Resize just for the heck of it.

SOOC Original:

[Gerald Kelberg]

Hey Bill, I think your repost looks much better.

Just to clarify, when I suggested "desaturate" I wasn't suggesting that you had added to the yellows, but was suggesting a reduction in the saturation as it came out of the camera. Probably would have been a simpler solution, but you have done pretty well with your workaround.

Best wishes, Gerald

[Bill Dewey]

Hey Bill, I think your repost looks much better.

Just to clarify, when I suggested "desaturate" I wasn't suggesting that you had added to the yellows, but was suggesting a reduction in the saturation as it came out of the camera. Probably would have been a simpler solution, but you have done pretty well with your workaround.

Best wishes, Gerald

No worries, Gerald. There are always 100 ways to accomplish most things in PP. In my defaults for LR I add a touch of saturation as a baseline, so that would not have been an unreasonable place to start. In this case once I brought the highlights down, and I think I dropped a touch of exposure, even I found the yellows more palatable. In the end, though, the end result always has to be something we like, right?

Thanks again for the hints and help, they are always appreciated.