Although I had driven the 80 or so miles from Houston to the Anahuac NWR for one purpose, to capture images of the least bitterns I knew would be hanging around in the morning if I could just locate them, I came across this kingbird and thought it a good subject to practice using my recently acquired flash for fill-flash purposes. The original image was clipped on the right, as is shown in this photograph. I cropped the other three sides. Minimal sharpening was done. The full sized image showed a good deal of feather detail in the upper chest area which was lost in size reduction for the web. I hand held the camera at 500mm, and although 1/1000sec may have been too fast a flash sync speed, a slower speed wasn't really an option since I usually will notice some blurring of an image even at 1/800sec at 500mm (750mm 35mm equivalent). Comments and criticism would be appreciated as always.~onlybill
PS. I did get some full-frame least bittern images as well, but I'll leave posting them to a later date.
Ananhuac NWR, 10:00 AM 6-22-2008, Sony A-700, Tamron 200-500mm@500mm Sony HVL-F56AM, 1/1000 sec F 6.3 ISO 200 hand held
Last edited by WIlliam Maroldo; 06-25-2008 at 10:05 PM.
Very nice William! Nice BG. The bird is a little far to the right for me and it looks soft to me though. I downloaded it and sharpened a little to see what would happen and it looks much better with a bit more sharpening. I also think that you could do something with the contrast and saturation. A great image, work on it!
Dan: I realize that the bird is too far to the right. The problem is that the right was clipped, and the only option would be to crop more on the left to bring the bird closer to the center. Is that what I should do? I had trouble with sharpening. When most of the bird was sharpened adequately there were small areas that showed kind of a flecked appearance. Perhaps I could mask the large areas that need sharpening and selectively sharpen them, and leave the problem areas alone ? I did up the contrast and saturation somewhat, perhaps I needed more. What was most noticeable was the image sharpness and detail in the full size image that were lost when downsampling to the size shown here. I know this is to be expected, but it seemed more than usual.
I cropped the left, sharpened more, increased saturation and contrast. There is a sharpening halo below the bird. Need to work on it some more, but I thought I'd post this anyway~onlybill
William, what I do for sharpening for web is do the resizing down to whatever your need is, then sharpen and selective sharpening would probably help with what you describe. Then, I preview the post to see what it looks like and then adjust from there. As for the clipped right side, that was just on the wish list to improve the image. You might be able to add canvas, but the perch would be very hard to reconstrust. As for the contrast, I guess, after looking again, the problem that I am seeing is that the back of the bird isn't lit, so maybe you could selectively lighten the back with Shadow/highlight filter. I am confident that others on this forum will be able to add much to this soon. And of course all comments are ment to be helpful and instructive. Dan
Here's a repost (didn't spend too much time on it so the cloning is not great). Sharpened, played around with Shadows/Highlights and Brightness/Contrast, and expanded the canvas on the right.
Thanks Doug. Are you related to Dan? You must be, you have the same last name. Anyway, I like the detail that you brought out on the bird's wing. Actually I do have a number of images of the bird that have the foliage that was cropped and could be cloned from them to this photo. Many of the images have the bird centered, but the bird's is facing the right, which seemed less interesting than the birds head position in this image. Thanks again for the assistance Dan and Doug.~onlybill
Outstanding thread !!!! Lots of good points and love the repost !!!
William there shouldn't be detail loss when posting, do check what you are doing. As mentioned do not sharpen till the very end and when downsizing use bicubic sharper !!!!
This is a beautiful bird and one I haven't seen myself. I like the composite repost; it's always interesting to read differing opinions/perspectives and the reposts are great visual learning tools. Thanks everyone.
Eastern Kingbird
