House finch

[Alex Becker]

Hi all,

A house finch taken at a feeder set up. I recently moved to a new apt where I have a small backyard so I'm trying to get some feeders and photography projects going. The light angle is tough but theres one section where the leaves act as diffusers in the shade giving an ok shutter speed. Some success so far, but difficulties dealing with some outdoors cats and such. I'll get more creative with perch choices, but here I picked a pretty simple stick (all I could find around that day ). In post, NR, sharpened, bit of eye work, cropped slightly.

Camera: Nikon D500
Lens: 300 f/4 PF + 1.4 TC
Specs: 1/1000 ISO 2000 f/5.6

Thanks for looking and commenting on prior posts!
Alex

[Don Lacy]

Nice HA with a good BG to pop the subject off of. You already mention the perch and my other suggestion would be to crop some of the dead space to the right.

[John Mack]

Nice view of this male. The background is excellent. I like the placement of the bird in the frame, don't mind all the negative space. Good luck with the new set up.

[Geoff Newhouse]

I would probably crop a little tighter like John says. Great clean background and a nice pose. The perch I'm sure will be improved in future attempts, just a little too plain to me. I am seeing a bit of blotchiness/posterization in the background which is maybe the NR settings or export settings...easy to fix. I'm not sure about the sharpening as it looks a little bit rough or over done?...not sure what it is....
I moved 1 year ago to a place with 5 acres of backyard from an apartment and having the opportunity to make setups and photograph at home any day of the week is something I will never give up again. Have fun with your setups!!

TFS
Geoff

[Bill Dix]

Nice simple comp and good pose. Clean BG. Enjoy your new location. We are also plagued by several neighborhood cats. Have spoken to their owner, to no avail. We have put a bell on the collar of the worst offender but it hasn't done much good. I wish I could offer a suggestion that was legal and ethical.

[Alex Becker]

Thanks all, much appreciated. Geoff, very jealous of your 5 acres -- hopefully one day I can get a similar set up. I'll take another look at the sharpening. Bill, yeah the bell doesn't seem to help much. A couple folks have mentioned a motion activated sprinkler as a decent deterrent that that shouldn't harm the cats, so that may be worth looking into.