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Thread: Mum, he's picking on me.

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    Default Mum, he's picking on me.

    Name:  IMG_6567-BPN.jpg
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    The birds are immature Australian Magpies. Very common birds but very intelligent and playful. The bird on the right had the younger one by the wing tip trying to stop it from begging for food from one of the adults. Another play routine I've only witnessed once was a bird that had found a short, round stick a centimetre or two in diameter. It was trying the balance on this on a slope with the result that the stick would roll down the slope with bird trying to 'walk' the rotating stick. It did this for a minute or two as we watched and seemed to be having a lot of fun. Another more common play routine for young birds is for one to lay on its back and play dead while another one has a go at it. Image shown was photographed at a golf course a few minutes walk from my home in Canberra.

    Technical: Canon 80D with EF 100-400 MkII at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/3200 sec, f8, ISO 1600. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 3, crop, lighting adjustments, default NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Very light NR applied to birds in focus and stronger NR to background. Selective lighting adjustments to birds to bring out detail in whites and blacks. Sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool) after final size reduction.

  2. #2
    Macro and Flora Moderator Jonathan Ashton's Avatar
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    Good quality image nice details. The bird on the left tends to complicate the scene a little for me.

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    Super Moderator Daniel Cadieux's Avatar
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    Thanks for describing what we are seeing here, must have been fun to photograph! Neat to see the feather tip caught in the bill, and I like the overall interaction. I agree about the third bird, nothing you could have done. I'd be tempted to add a point or two of reds to the overall color balance as the image seems a touch blue/green - no doubt caused by the well manicured golf lawn.

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    Thanks Jonathan and Daniel. I agree the third bird doesn't add. I will also revisit the colour balance here.

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