Long tailed hermit (Phaetornis guy) from Santa Elena
Surfing in my hard disk I have found this old file from my trip to Costa Rica, some years ago, and I decided to post the image here. It is not a very good image from the technical point of view. In fact is not very sharp at 100% and it is a jpeg (too bad that I was shooting jpeg in the past!) and I have no exif data. I only can say that it is a bit croped and that it was made with a Nikon D70 and the slow AF Nikkor 80-400VR. Whatever the poor technical quality I like this image a lot and it is not only due to the nice memories from the trip but also by the mood of the scene. It is a backlight but the flash made a decent job filling the shadows. The light areas in the leaf at the BG are sun rays filtering from the canopy.
The eye has been worked in PS to reduce the effect of the flash "steel-like" eye)
Self critic: I did a wrong job croping the image, a bit of more room at the bottom would be much better. I did a VERY BAD choice shooting jpeg... :(
Very high ISO. Another round of noise reduction has not a great effect on the image so I decide to live with the noise
Your coment and critics are highly apreciated :)
Nikon D70 AF 80-400VR at 380 (I rarely used that lens at 400mm), croped, jpeg
I agree that it is very nice.
If you're looking for critics, then I would suggest that the tail is a bit blown out and I'm not a huge fan of the obvious flashed effect on the motion blur (not sure what this is called exactly) that creates ghosting. The head is really beautiful though, and pops out well.
Beautiful species and good eye contact. I like the blur in the wings that donates the action and as already mention the tail is slightly blown out but still a fine image Juan. /Many thanks for sharing.
Long tailed hermit (Phaetornis guy) from Santa Elena
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