Hello,
Attached is a picture of a Female House Sparrow, I think. This little lady made my day by landing on a bench beside me and waiting while I took a few pictures. When I started to try and photograph birds, I quickly learned that even a 300mm lenses on a 1.5x camera body wasn't long enough to capture a full frame image of most birds.
Nikon D200
70-300 VR at 270mm
F5.6, 1/320s, ISO 100
Program mode and Matrix metering.
I have adjusted the levels, cropped, re-sized and sharpened.
Thank you for looking,
Clive
Hi Clive,
I like the base composition...the bird is a little soft. the head angle and eye contact is off, it needs about one degree of CW rotation. The perch is a bit on the light side...I adjusted your composition by taking a tad from the bottom, and from the left side of the frame, and added canvas to the right hand side in the direction that your subject is pointing to. I also selective sharpened the eye area...see if this presents well to you...:cool:
Hi Clive Remember head angle We like to have the bird slightly turned toward us Just looks better and will also have the eye and tip of beak in the same plane so both will be in focus.
btw regarding lenses ... a 300 with the camera crop factor becomes a 450 and not easy to hold steady at your used shutter speed !!! To go up form there you could get a 300 f4.0 which will be much sharper and can use a 1.4X converter !!! Neat combination which will be just under 600mm !!!! Looking forward to the next one !!!
Gus,
Wow, a very constructive critique and a retouched photo. Thank you.
I am surprised by the amount of impact a cm or so of space on the side that the bird is looking toward adds. The original has a more space to the right but I cropped it out. I wouldn't have considered head angle as part of the composition. I will be looking for that in the future.
Alfred
Thank you for pointing out the correlation between my shutter speed and the sharpness of my pictures.
I have some intellectual understanding but I thought that 1/320 of sec was fast.
Please don't get me started with the lens envy. :) I have already been looking for a used longer, faster lens. They don't seem to come available too often and tend to be at the limit or out of my budget.
Thank you for the kind words Jackie. I see we are neighbours.
I can see that I have lots to learn here. Now I really want to run out and take some more photographs.
Take care,
Clive
House Sparrow?
