Yellow Warbler

[Jack Backs]

It was a pretty good spring for warbler photography here in Missouri. We had a lengthy, quite cold spring such that as warblers started arriving there was still a lot of open canopy
and vegetation that had not started to green up yet. This warbler was probably pretty close to the minimum focal distance for my lens/TC combo. The rest of the body was out of
focus and I almost deleted the image out of hand, but noticed the head feather detail was probably better than any other image I have of this species. I'm not sure how much better
I could do with trying to hunt one down with a 200mm macro. The bird was on a nearly vertical vine. I guess I could rotate the image 45 degrees or so an make it appear as a branch.

D500/500mmF4VRII/TC-14EIII

1/1250s, F8, iso320

[Dorian Anderson]

The detail is amazing, Jack! About as good as it gets. But the bird is really cramped in the frame, he needs some breathing room which necessarily means giving back at least a bit of the detail when you loosen the crop. There is also some fairly serious posterization in the background. The whole image is really cold/steely, particularly the perch. Curious what it might look like warmed up a bit.

[John Mack]

Like what you were going for here. Don't usually see head portraits of warbler's or any small birds. The crop is very tight.

[Jack Backs]

I had to go back and look at the raw file. The tip of the was touching the top of the frame and the tip tail was almost touching the bottom of the frame.
You know how it is trying to track small, active birds at close range. There wasn't any opportunity to rotate the camera to the vertical position. I used another
image in the series to get the shape of the branch and background above the bill. I guess it wouldn't be that hard make up some more. The white balance
could be warmed up some. Going from 4550(as shot) to 5500 doesn't seem to change the yellow of the bird that much.

[Allen Sparks]

Hi Jack,
I like the eye and head detail - a close up we rarely get to see for a warbler. Might want to clean up some of the noise on the perch.
Allen

[Arthur Morris]

Please post a JPEG that shows the original image full frame.

thanks with love, artie

[Jack Backs]

Jpeg of out of camera raw file.

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks. Not a bad job of adding canvas and rebuilding the bill tip. And a good job of focusing on the eye. This image is the poster child with regards to the need for lots of d-o-f with small birds at point blank range. With the filtered light, I would likely have hit the delete key on this one ...

with love, artie