Stretching the wings

[Victor Banerjee]

Took this image of a flycatcher at the Mission Bay UCSF garden. I used 1/1000 of shutter speed and kept the iso at 250. The lens was wide open at f4.
The equipment that I used was canon 60D and 500 mm f4 ISII lens. The lens was mounted on a tripod and gimbal head.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Hi Victor, welcome to BPN!! Awesome first post. I love the subject's pose and great look at the wing. I like the thin perch as well. Good BG. I do feel the image a touch bright overall, with the blacks a bit thin and the brightest whites needing to be toned down. I also wish the oof twigs at right were not there. All-in-all a rather enjoyable image. Hope to see more from you, as well as some critiques :-)

[Victor Banerjee]

Hi Daniel,
Thank you very much for your input. I shall edit the image according to the suggestions. About the oof twigs, I can clone them out but I do not know if that is acceptable.

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Victor and welcome.

Nice image but for too many branches. Eliminating distracting background elements for images here on BPN is fine; we do ask that you let folks know what you have done. I would recommend not using the Clone Stamp to remove the branches. For the re-post I used the Patch Tool, my Divide and Conquer technique, a small Quick Mask or two refined by a Regular Layer Mask, and some Content Aware Fill. Then I ran a 65 pixel Gaussian blur on new layer of the image, added a Hide-All (Black or Inverse) Mask, and painted in the effect in 33% increments as needed to smooth the background. Then a small crop. And last I boosted the BLACKs a bit with a Levels Adjustment and toned down the WHITEs with a Curves Adjustment as suggested by Dan.

You can learn to do all of the above in The BIRDS AS ART Current Workflow e-Guide (Digital Basics II). Scroll down here to learn more about the guide and more about the background smoothing technique.

With love, artie

[Arthur Morris]

ps: I could have done a lot better with the RAW file :)

artie

[Dorian Anderson]

Welcome! Lots of good suggestions here to improve a nice action image. Nice to see this often ignored species
getting a bit of love.

[Victor Banerjee]

Hey Arthur,
Thank you very much for your advice. I am re posting the image with the corrections that you and Daniel suggested. To my eye it improved a lot. Let me know what do you feel.
I recently purchased “The art of Bird Photography Vol 1”. It is an excellent guide for bird photographers, not even for a beginner like me but also for professionals.I can surely say that now I have better understanding of how to expose my subject properly (not perfect yet but working on it J). I am sure I will learn a lot more when I finish reading the book.
If you remember, I requested you to provide some suggestionsregarding which lens to buy, sigma 500 or canon 500. As per your suggestion, Ifinally purchased canon 500 version II lens this month and I am very happy withit (bought it from adorama). Thanks again for your suggestion, I reallyappreciate it.
-Victor

[Victor Banerjee]

Thanks Dorian !