This image of a Magnificent Hummingbird was captured on a recent birding trip to Costa Rica. The bird was perched against several flowering trees. I cloned out / painted over several white or specular elements of the background, and cropped slightly (about 15%). Comments / critiques welcome.
Wendy great natural looking bird portrait.. The only suggestion would be perhaps reduce the size of your watermark and alter the colour to blend/harmonise with the image..
Hi Wendy! Take my comments with a grain of salt, I'm still very much learning here ....
First of all, congrats on your trip! Had a friend just come back from Costa Rica, and the pics she brought back were so full of color!!
As she explained to me (well, at least in her situation) the birds are drawn in by food, and landing branches are then made available close-by. This allows photographers to get very close white still standing inside the lodge/on the deck (lodge is up off the ground of course).
Anyway, my point for all that was ..... were you pretty close to your subject? It looks like your DOF was so tight that you just missed getting the tail feathers in as tight a focus as the head.
I'm guessing that for a hummingbird you didn't have a lot of time to play around with settings ... quick little guys!!!
Still a beautiful pic to me -- I also really like the bark texture of the branch. It would have been nice if the branch was a little thinner, but we don't always get to choose where a bird alights, do we? :)
Very cute little bird with a nice setting and composition. As Andrew said, the branch is a little big, but of course you don't often have a choice. If it was a setup specifically for hummers, they should have had smaller perches. The texture of the branch also unfortunately competes. You might try a slight blur on the branch, just to see the results.
Even though the bird seems sharp and well-detailed, with good tonalities, a brighter BG with a darker subject can be a problem. You might try tome partial opacity cloning to simplify some of the "edges" a little.
Thanks, all. At this particular lodge, no perches were set up near the feeders: the birds just flew into the nearby foliage. Diane, can you describe more about what you mean by "partial opacity cloning" to simplify the edges. I'm not sure what you are suggesting that I clone.
Wendy, I think all bases have been covered here. This is a cute little bird with a colourful BG. I don't mind the DoF being a bit "tight". His head and eye is in good focus. I agree (of course) with Diane about some of the edges. Some of the edges of the BG are quite sharp, particularly the blue. I do believe you may also have a bit of a magenta cast creeping in?
I'm talking about the color transitions in the BG, which are a bit strong and compete with the bird. I would use the cloning brush at maybe 50% opacity to soften some of those "edges." You'd need a fairly large brush so would need to mask just to the BG.
Another possible option for the perch...crop it so only half of the
perch is showing. Of course this means no more tail, but since its
barely showing anyway, I don't think it would be missed much if
it wasn't there.
I would also look into cropping off a little on the right hand side.
Thanks to the long beak, the bird is almost to centered.
If you're feeling dangerous, try a vertical crop. Again this means
hacking off the tail, but it might work.
Hi Wendy, I would not crop any further, otherwise you are throwing away good information from the original capture and the IQ will suffer, especially if you print the image later. Try to keep as close to the original capture and if time allows, shoot other options i.e. portrait, in that way you will retain IQ, avoiding pixel bash and hammer the **** out of the image. I agree that f/4 is not ideal, but I'm not sure how far you can push the ISO on the MKII, as the MKI you really needed to be spot on with exposure, no room of error. But, increasing DoF will lower you SS so it's a compromise. Was there any option of some Fill-in flash, was this with Doug Brown?
Just as an alternative, remove the cast out from the perch, but also just reduce the 'vibrancy' (not necessarily the adjustment tool, just a figure of speech) in the BKG, in that way you can bring a bit more prominence to the subject. Also you can then I feel get a bit more depth and colour from the subject. The aqua blue near the beak has to go, too distracting.
Thanks, all, for your valuable input. I will work on de-emphasizing the background and perch to make the bird more prominent. Steve, I really like the way you brought out the colors in the bird on your repost. Re: a flash: this was not a photography tour, it was simply a birding tour, so it was not conducive to the use of a flash. And, yes, an ISO of 1000 is as high as I can go with the 7D Mark II, so that limited my DOF.
I do have a question about ISO. Some of my photos on my trip were taken with the 300 f/4 lens, and some with the new 100-400 II lens. In looking over my photos now, I think that the noise at relatively high ISO's is worse on the photos taken with the 300 f/4 lens. Given that the high noise level of the 7D (even the II) is usually attributed to the camera itself, do you have an explanation for why the 100-400 II handles noise better than the 300 lens? Can the improved optics of the newer lens overcome the noise to a greater extent? I'm also noticing that the 100-400 II images are so sharp that I can reduce the noise to some extent in LR without it noticeably degrading the image, but that doesn't explain why the images don't look as noisy to begin with when the same ISO is used for both lenses. I would welcome your thoughts about this.
If you are using equivalent exposures the noise shouldn't vary with the lens. A lower exposure brought up in post will give more noise. What is your raw converter? Are you using any auto adjustments?
Wendy, providing you nail the exposure i.e. avoid having to 'lift' lighten the darks/shadows and have a high SS then really there should not be an issue. The newer lens should be better, as the optics will have been upgraded, however IMHO it all comes down to the earlier part of my reply. There was a thread about focusing and sharpness issues of the 7D MkII and I know one or two people here, have quickly sold for a better body.
Diane and Steve...thanks for your input. Diane...I am not using any auto adjustments. My workflow is to tweak with the sliders in Lightroom 5, and then export it to Photoshop CS6 where it is opened up as a TIFF file. So that means the RAW conversion is done in LR, correct?
If you are using LR's Develop module, that is the raw converter. PS has a "helper program" that is Adobe Camera Raw, the same raw conversion engine as LR with a different interface. But when you open a file from LR into PS, it opens in PS (not in ACR) with whatever settings you had in the Develop module, even if they are just the default ones. And of course the defaults are not what you want. They should always be tweaked to give the best results. Sounds like that is what you are doing.
From the looks of this handsome hummer, you don't have any focus issues with the 7D2. And focus would have nothing to do with your question about noise -- only exposure would. That would vary with lenses only if one had a consistent issue with stopping down more or less than the other and you were somehow compensating with an exposure adjustment of which you weren't aware -- thus the question or auto adjustments.
Magnificent Hummingbird
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