(c) Scarlet Macaw Preening

[Charles Wesley]

The weather stinks here in northern Florida. No outside photos today. Here's another in a series of scarlet macaw photos. Once he started this preening behavior I tried to get a good angle for DOF. All I could do was get the eye in focus.

Canon EOS- 1D, EF 500 f/ 4.0 L, BB with 550 EX flash and my Wimberley and tripod. My exposure was 1/ 250 sec. @ f/ 5.6 at ISO 400.

Enjoy..
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Charlie Wesley
St. Augustine Beach, FL
http://naturesphotographs.com

[Doug Brown]

Great color and the head is really sharp. The reds look like they could benefit from a slight desaturation. I like the color of the OOF feathers, but I think you could convey that same sense of color without so much OOF plumage with a tighter crop.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Neat preening pose, i like it alot. I like the deeper blue feather in LRC so I wouldn't crop too much more...maybe enough to hide the dark area directly underneath it. My folks' neighbour has the very same species in her house (she has had this bird for 30+ years!) and the reds do look this vibrant at times.

[Charles Wesley]

Thanks for the kind comments. I'm playing around with a better crop. I actually did not do any saturation with CS4 on the image. These birds are very colorful to my eye especially in open shade tree canopy lighting. DPP 3.5 seems to really show the colors. Will take a look at a slight desaturated image...
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Charlie Wesley
St. Augustine Beach, FL

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the details, preening pose and BG. Saturation looks fine on my monitor. It would have been great to see a bit more of the beak.

[Doug Brown]

It's the reds right above the eye that are hot on my monitor.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

It's the reds right above the eye that are hot on my monitor.

I see what you mean and wouldn't be surprised if it were due to sRGB conversion.

[Tony Whitehead]

I'm with Doug in thinking a tighter crop would work. The reds are losing a lot of detail but hard to recover it without looking washed out. The green BG with pale streaks is distracting to me and I think might be suitable for desaturation.