First time uploading an image to this site so hopefully all goes well. This is one of my first images using my newly acquired Nikon 200-400 f4 on my D3. I took this image in front of my house here in Ontario, Canada. Image pretty much the way it came out of the camera apart from some cropping and mild amount of sharpening in CS3
Settings were as follows:
Nikon D3, Nikkor 200-400 f4,
ISO 400, focal length 400 mm, shutter speed 1/320, aperture f5.6
Taken on tripod with Wimberley 2 mount and SB800 flash with Better Beamer extender
Just starting to do some bird photography so am a novice in the whole process. Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Finding bird photography quite a challenge and suspect will require lots of practice over time. I am certainly enjoying this website and viewing some of the remarkable images that people are submitting to the site.
Big Time Welcome Bob ...... and Big Time Congrats on you new rig !!! Sweeeet !!!!
Doing great with this one Exposure is right one, good even light on the bird and very sharp (very sharp) Would consider cropping a tad from the left to keep him out of the center giving a little more room in the direction he is looking. The only distracting thing are the oof white circles particularly the one close to the head.
For printing you could evict some of the smaller branches for a cleaner image but like it a lot as presented !!!! Looking forward to more !!!!
Very nice first post, Bob! The circles certainly are a distraction - you can get past that with careful cloning and a little gaussian blur. You did an excellent job of capturing the bird at a good angle and with good detail and focus!
Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. Its great to get constructive feedback on how to improve.
I'll work on some more images and post them in the near future
Here is the image with the adjustments that people suggested. In looking over my images I did have the same image taken from a slight different angle which produced less of the distracting background highlights. I also cloned out some of the branches in the lower left of the image as well as cropping a little of the left side to move the image more over to the left for better compositional appeal.
House Finch
