Taken a few weeks ago along a lake edge in Canberra. I liked the setting and particularly the texture on the bullrush perch, along with the bird's pose. I have blurred a leaf lower left part of image that was in focus, leaving just the bird and perch in focus. Crop is about 40% of the frame area. While these birds are very common, they are delightful, hyperactive and inquisitive - and much photographed as a result. They have also been the subject of a number of studies to understand the complex relationships and social interactions in the small groups that they move around in.
As always, thank you for looking and for any comments you are kind enough to share.
Technical: Canon 80D with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM Mk II at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/4000 sec, f7.1, ISO 1600. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 2.5, crop, lighting adjustments, reduced luminance NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Modest NR to bird and stronger NR to background. Bird only sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian Blur, 0.3 pixels at 50%) after final size reduction.
Amazingly I like the BG despite how busy it is. Only the thin arched twig touching the forehead is unfortunate IMO, but everything else seems to fal in place nicely. I love the puffiness of the subject, and the perch looks good. Sounds like these guys behave (and have physical similarities) to our chickadees.
Thank you John and Daniel. Like many small birds, these like moving in protected environments where they can escape quickly to cover. While it's always nice to get a great clean background, it is really not reflective of where many small species live and feed - but getting a busy background that works is a lot more challenging. I accept that the twig touching the forehead is unfortunate. I forgot to mention that I did tone it down a bit in processing this but hard to get perfection in these situations. These birds are so fast as well that moving and recomposing is simply not feasible. You take what you get and hope it's going to work.
Superb fairywren female #2
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