Speckled Warbler

[Simon Bennett]

Speckled Warbler perched in a dead boxthorn. In the local remnant eucalypt woodland patches, the boxthorn is an environmental weed which are chopped down and left, this provides good cover for a number of small birds.

Canon 40D, EF500 f/4 + 1.4 tc, tripod, ISO400, 1/500, f/8, evaluative, full frame, a couple of twigs cloned out, including one protruding vertically from her folded tertials.

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Simon Bird and bg looks great I like the detail, soft light and pose. Having trouble with the perch So many branches in/out focus detracts from the image, Could crop from the bottom to minimize and clone others Sure wish you could find him on a clean perch !!!

[Markus Jais]

I like the perch. superb shot. great colors and soft light. wonderful sharpness.

Markus

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Very nice light, details, eye contact and BG. I find the perch quite interesting and might only clone out the separate vertical branches that are OOF.

[Linda Robbins]

Wonderful pose, beautiful detail, and lovely bg. I like the perch, and if I changed anything it would be to clone out the small oof background branches.
Well done. Very nice image.

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Simon,
I like your image and capture, The colors are very nice and you have good detail. The head angle is fine. I too fine the perch very busy, disrupting the flow and balance of your composition. In addition, the branch going through the bird's tail is a killer. I modified your composition by trimming your perch quite a bit. See if you like it...:cool:

[Arthur Morris]

Hey Simon. I took in a whoosh of breath when I opened this one. So spectacularly sharp and immensely high image quality. I too am fine with the thorns. A small crop from the bottom and possibly losing the one branch on the right frame edge might work really well.

Flash???

Gus, thanks for the repost effort but the quality of the cloning work is very poor at best. There are big differences in tonality and obvious clone/smudge marks especially in the entire rhc.

For this repost I did a small crop from the bottom and got rid of a very few branches.

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

Excellent image Simon of a rare (in Sydney at least extremely) bird. Don't mind the thorny perch at all. I believe this is the male as it appears not to have the distinct brownish eyebrow the ladies do.

[Simon Bennett]

Thank you all for your comments.

Artie asked 'Flash???'
Short answer: none; Long answer: It was a very overcast morning and I do have a couple of earlier OOF obstructed shots using flash -1 2/3 with the bird peeking out of the thicket. At around 8 am the sun broke through changing the background from dull grey to the warm colour in the image, and there was some warm light shining on the thicket where the bird was. So I thought I should try with the flash off. As it turned out the thicket went back into shade just as the bird emerged and sat unobstructed, but I just keep shooting. The bird then moved off. At the time I thought I'd mucked it up because I had a brightish warm light illuminated background and the subject shaded somewhat, and that I should have left the jolly fill flash on. These are active little birds, and as it turned I think the extra shutter speed helped freeze the bird better than I would with the flash on(it wasn't in high speed mode).

When I got home and looked at the image it was pretty dark (here is an unaltered downsized jpg of the original). To get to the image as posted I basically followed Artie's ABP II workflow, but added + 0.7 exposure when loading into Photoshop and then double the amount of shadows processing (12->25) in Shadows/Highlights, also applied Neat Image noise reduction and slight bit of extra sharpening around the face, then just normal levels/curves/sat(+12)/selective color. I then used Manyk's method to downsize and sharpen for web presentation http://news.deviantart.com/article/20250/

[Arthur Morris]

No flash speaks volumes as to the amazing quality of 40D images. And you did a great job with the image optimization.

[Tony Whitehead]

Superb image Simon. I really like the contrast in textures between the thorns and the feathers while at the same time they share colours.