Pheasant

[LaurieBraman]

Saw this guy on the side of the road feasting in a stubble corn field. I think he saw me?? Very cooperative subject. Thank goodness I was only hunting with my camera.


Camera Model: Canon EOS 40D
Lens: EF500mm f/4L IS USM
Focal Length: 500mm
Shutter Speed: 1/500 sec
Exposure Mode: Program
Exposure compensation: 0
Aperture: 5.6
ISO: 200
Focal length 500mm
Flash: Off
Metering Mode: Multi-segment
Metering: Pattern
Birds as Art Blubb-Big Lens Ultimate Bean Bag

[Dominic Cantin]

hum , 36kb for an image of 1024px is too much compression ! Try to keep the level at 9 or 10 in photoshop.

I'm sure he saw you Laurie ;)

Dom :)

[Axel Hildebrandt]

The look is quite funny. :) I would give it more room and agree that it appears to lack details, probably due to heavy compression.

[Tony Whitehead]

Compression is hurting this image as noted above. If this is full frame it it probably one of the rare cases in bird photography of too much lens. I think more room to show the whole bird would be good, alternatively crop from the right to move the eye off centre. Try a repost with less compression as I am sure there is a lot that could be done to optimise this lovely close capture.

[LaurieBraman]

Not sure if this is better, but I went back into photoshop and try and come up with a larger file to post. I'm fairly new to Photoshop but on the other hand, I was very close to this bird. Two lane road and he was on the drivers side and I had my 500 mm with 1.4 TC. I took a few others with my smaller lens so if this is not better perhaps I should work on processing one of the other photos.

Thanks for your advice. Just took me a while to decide how to implement it.

[Tony Whitehead]

Big improvement, Laurie. Still tempted to decentre the eye by cropping form the right.

[Juan Aragonés]

I think that the best composition for this image is with less space in the right and more at the left. Some levels adjustment in the dark areas of the neck and head, another round of USM and a litle bit of saturation can improve the result IMO. :)