I liked the bokeh so much that I decided to upload it here. I thought let me see if others like it.
I'd have preferred a more horizontal composition. But I had my camera in vertical position. Hence, the square crop. Does the crop work?
40d; 300 f/4L non-IS; f/5.6; 1/250; iso 640; flash comp -1 2/3;
USM on the bird. NR on the BG. I did not dial in any exp. comp as I wanted to maintain the shutter speed. Added +2/3 during raw conversion in DPP.
generally i dont prefer square crop but due the beauty of the image i didn't even notice the squary crop.
so you can take is from my side.
the white gap highlight over the head and under the tail gives more attention.
you should selectively reduce that.
i think you could have used little higher aperture to avoid focus issue.
seems your focus target was on the feather on center of the bird.
and the head is bit out of focus compare to the center portion of the bird.
may be selective enhancing the head portion may give better feel to the overall image.
Thanks for the comments. Blue jays dont sit tight enough...at least for me:-) And with a 1.4x, my lens does not focus very fast in shade. I had my camera in vertical position as it was sitting vertically. But it quickly changed its position.
Mital, you are right. The critical focus is not on the head.
I am not a big fan of square format but I think it works in this case. The BG is very bright and saturated IMO, specially in the lower left and upper right corner and distract a bit from the main subject. Fill flash did not a good job on thi scase because the bird looks flat and a bit underxposed (but I am not a flash expert!). You can fix in PS with dodge and burning tools, level adjustment on the bird only and desaturating the greens a bit. Something like this
Mital, not too much time to repeat the process right now (it is dinner time and we have two litle children asking for their meals :D) but I will try to explain with more details tomorrow.
Hi all, I promised to add more information about my processing job on thi simage but things has been a litle bit complicated for me in the past week (lots of work and not enought free time :o).
Please have a look at the following thread in which there is additional information about how I process images like this one http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...ad.php?t=11412
hope it helps
thx Juan. You seem to be vvery very good at this. Frankly, its a little too overwhelming for me. I have photoshop elements (not cs4 or cs3) and I usually just do simple selections and selective sharpness/cuves/NR/color optimization. some minor cloning here and there. I sit in front of the computer whole day at work and have no appetite to do the same after going back home :-)
Blue jay
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