Blue-gray Gnatcatcher

[Joseph Przybyla]

Went to Circle B Bar Reserve in Polk County, Florida early Monday morning. I got a couple quick frames of this Blue-gray Gnatcatcher before it took flight. Comments and critique welcomed and appreciated. Thank you for viewing.

Nikon D500
Nikon 80-400mm F/4.5-5.6 VRII AF-S ED image captured at 400mm
1/1000 F/5.6 Matrix Metering EV +1 ISO 900 Auto 1 WB, camera supported by a monopod
Post processed in Lightroom Classic CC, Photoshop CC 2019 and Neat Image for noise reduction, removed a blossom and stem that was merging with the head of the bird
Cropped for composition and presentation

[David Roach]

Looks like an awesome image. You have some sort of artifacts (no expert here), maybe from resizing or conversion?

[Arthur Morris]

Nice one Joe. You work too hard. The wings look a bit sharper than the face

David, where are you seeing the artifacts?

a

[David Roach]

Hi Artie, I see them all over the perch. Very prominent on the upper section bud in particular.

[Geoff Newhouse]

I like the simplicity of the image with a nice perch and great background. I also noticed the artifacts (orange-peel) on the perch above the bird. Looks like oversharpening of some OOF noise maybe?
Otherwise, very nice image.

TFS
Geoff

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks If you guys are referring to the tiny gray line I think that it might be a very skinny vine. But I do not have a good eye for fine details (and I am serious about that).

a

[Joseph Przybyla]

Thanks everyone for viewing and commenting, very much appreciated.

David and Geoff, yup, your'e right. I had to go 1:1 to really see what both of your describe. I lowered the amount of sharpening and radius of sharpening until I could not see the, as you say, orange peel effect. Then I applied a little more sharpening to just the bird with the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom. Here is a repost, I think it is better. Thank you for another set of eyes, sometimes mine get a little old.

[John Mack]

Nice perch,pose and excellent background. The top of the perch does look funky. The thin gray line might be a web on the perch.

[Isaac Grant]

I have yet to get a proper image of a BG Gnatcatcher so I envy the opportunity you had. Nice enough perch and a good background. This is held back by overall poor image quality. I am not sure what others are seeing but the head is not tack sharp and the flanks have several over exposed spots. I know I will sound super picky here but branches that are angling away from the bird are not ideal as you get a bunch of branch in the foreground that is out of focus as well as a bunch of stuff in the background as well. It is not far enough back to look pleasing to my eye and just looks messy. Hopefully you get more opportunities with these little guys.

Edit: On my phone the image quality looks a bit better so this may be one of those shots that depending on what screenn you view it on, the quality will vary as well.

[Joseph Przybyla]

I have yet to get a proper image of a BG Gnatcatcher so I envy the opportunity you had. Nice enough perch and a good background. This is held back by overall poor image quality. I am not sure what others are seeing but the head is not tack sharp and the flanks have several over exposed spots. I know I will sound super picky here but branches that are angling away from the bird are not ideal as you get a bunch of branch in the foreground that is out of focus as well as a bunch of stuff in the background as well. It is not far enough back to look pleasing to my eye and just looks messy. Hopefully you get more opportunities with these little guys.

Edit: On my phone the image quality looks a bit better so this may be one of those shots that depending on what screenn you view it on, the quality will vary as well.

Hey Isaac, thank you for viewing and commenting. I have to disagree with your critique. Below is a print screen showing the focus point and image data. The focus point was on the back head and shoulder. The depth of field was 4 inches +/-, certainly enough to get the whole bird in focus. Yes the perch was angled so parts are out of sharp focus, it was early morning with dim light so for a shutter speed of 1/1000 the aperture had to be wide open 5.6. Few times does is a perch square to the sensor/back of the camera and unless the light is bright so that a higher aperture with more depth of field can be used this is the result. The image was exposed to the right to lessen noise in the dim early morning light but nothing was clipped. I checked the RGB values in the areas you say are overexposed, they are not. The RGB values are 249.1, 249.1, 228.9, bright but not clipped or over exposed as measured on my profiled/calibrated Eizo display. I chose to leave it as is. That is artistic license of how I chose to edit the image. Thanks again for viewing and commenting.

[Isaac Grant]

Joe as I said on my 5k Imac the image quality of the head is poor. Not sure what you are seeing.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Jo I am sorry but I looked at both images and there is something "wrong" here. Your images are usually far better IQ than this. Is it a large crop, was it under exposed, did you resize it in some way differently, did you apply a different sharpening regime???????? It looks noisy and or oversharpened to me. I wonder if at some point there was an inadvertent change to your usual algorithm?