A few days ago I played phone tag with this warbler in the forest. Each time he flew by to check me out, he landed in a partially- or fully-obscured perch. I was just about to give up when he found a branch in a shaft of sunlight, and gave me his "teacher, teacher, teacher" song. I took out a few highlit twigs in the background.
D500, 500f4 + 1.4 TC, ISO 800, 1/2000s @ f/7.1 manual; fill @ -3.0.
Hi Bill, Nice job getting one of these guys on a pretty clean perch. I like the black BG. Details look pretty good as does the catchlight. I do wish for just a bit more of a head turn towards you. I don't mind the green leaves as I think they add some balance to the frame, but it does look like something kinda weird is going on with the lower right leaf where it meets the perch -- it looks just a little too smoothed over? A nice frame of a hard to capture bird, TFS
I love the look of the warbler singing against a dark background that has just some hints of green in it. Unique and very nice picture Bill. I agree with Alex re the head angle and also about the smoothed over area near the leaves. I think a vertical composition would work well here. If mine I would clone out the leaf on the lower left and do an 8:10 crop. My right edge would be to the left of where the leaves on the right touch the stem. This would solve the problem of the leaf touching the bird and also the smoothed over area. I would also give a little more room above for the bird to sing into which is an easy fix using a content aware fill. Thoughts on that?
Nice singing pose Bill, and I like Isaacs suggestion of going vertical. I'm not a fan of flash, but the effect here is subtle and works on this occasion.
Thanks guys. Alex, I agree about that leaf. That's a situation I've faced before and I'm not sure how to handle it. An oof leaf overlapping part of the subject that you want to select and sharpen. You end up with a sharpened edge against oof leaf that looks weird. As you quickly picked up, I tried to blur the leaf and it doesn't look right. But still, I like the touches of green in the image. So here's a repost that removes the problem leaf. (Don't look too closely for clone repeats; you might find some.) See below for a second repost per Isaac's suggestion.
Thanks Bill, I've also run into that situation as well and haven't had much luck with it either. I like both reposts but if I had to pick one I think I would go with pane #5 although page #6 is very clean.