Took this photo of a chickadee last week. It was difficult to get a clear shot because it was right in the middle of a small tree, but I managed. There were several distracting branches in the background that I had to clone out.
Any C&C are welcome!
Olympus SP-550 UZ
f4.5 @ 1/160, ISO 200, -0.3 EV
Program mode, spot metering, auto WB
Processed in Photoshop CS2; cropped, curves adjustment, saturation increase, noise reduction, sharpening, some burning of the snow, dodged the eye a bit, and cloned out BG branches
A very nice composition indeed Christopher,
The bird is placed just right in frame, displaying sharp details and good color rendition. You have a good head angle and eye contact...suggestions: I would recommend toning down the whites in the snow because they are running hot and open up or lighten the eye and surrounding face area to bring out more of the details; and selective sharpen the eye. would also run noise reduction in the background...good show...looking forward to your next capture...:cool:
Hi Christpher Good suggestions I like how you first tried in camera to avoid some of the branches, best thing to do then is something minor remains you can do in PS Looks natural !!! Might go slightly tighter top and bottom for changing the proportion Excellent capture !!
Thanks for the comments and suggestions, I really appreciate them. In this repost, I toned down the whites in the snow a little, lightened and selective sharpened the eye, and did another pass of noise reduction on the background. Alfred, I tried your suggestion of going tighter on the top and bottom but a narrower crop just didn't seem to suit it, so I went with my original crop. How does this look?
Amazingly beautiful capture, especially with a digicam ~ shows that it is the photographer, not the camera.
Well done with your PS work as well.
Many thanks for sharing your lovely photograph.
Uncle Gus
BTW: Gina & I have used every Olympus Cxxx UZ model up to yours, and constanly get over 1000 hits/wk on 1500 photos . . . Now, would be great if more manufactures made options that would fit Olympus cameras.
Chickadee
