Young Yellow Faced Honeyeater

[Christopher C.M. Cooke]

Captured on Canon 30D 300mm F4 IS + 1.4X Con.(420mm) 1/1000 sec, f/5.6, iso 800, Pattern mettering, Shutter priority, +0.3 step.

http://birdphotographers.net/forums/...1&d=1202605977

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Pretty bird and nice eye contact. I'm not so sure about the composition, I would go for a rectangular crop and apply noise reduction on the BG.

[Jim Neiger]

Hi Chris,

I lik ethe fluffed pose, head position, and bg. The bg does apear very noisy. Perhaps selectively sharpening just the bird would have avoided most of the noise. If that doesn't work, try blurring the bg with the blur tool.

[Dean Ingwersen]

Hi Chris,

Nice shot, but agree with the comments about the noisy background. Should be easy to fix. And the caption calls this a young Yellow-faced Honeyeater...it's actually an adult White-plumed Honeyeater.

[Christopher C.M. Cooke]

Thanks folks I will see what I can do with your advice.:)

it's actually an adult White-plumed Honeyeater

Mea culpa! you are quite right. But an adult, here is the adult feeding the younger one taken in December and I see significant differences between the juvenile and the adult?

[Lana Hays]

Chris
Not much to add that hasn't already been stated. I'd go with adding more room on the right.....thus making it a rectangular image. Also, the noise should be removed. You do have a nice pose and that fluffed up look always adds to the detail. It also looks like you may have cloned something around the tail and under the bird. This is a nice, simple bird image and certainly worth reworking. I'm just wondering if this was a large crop and/or underexposed in the original as both of those can lead to added noise.

[Jeff Nadler]

Chrsitopher, the noise has been mentioned but would be curious why. Would not expect this much noise at ISO 800 on 30D unless a huge crop. Noise reduction would surely improve the image.

[Christopher C.M. Cooke]

I have re-cropped the image, applied sharpening in CS3 and tried NR in NN using the brush tool.

http://birdphotographers.net/forums/...1&d=1202673404

[Jeff Nadler]

Chris, I don't think this tighter crop works well. The background noise and loss of detail is too severe and mega crop comes to mind immediately. It's not worth cropping the subject so large, if quality suffers.

[Dean Ingwersen]

Juvenile and immature birds have pinkish coloured bills (which you can see in the image you posted of the juv being fed by the adult) and an indistinct or absent plume...but all birds with black bills are at least 2 years old - this comes from banding data on the species. Hope this helps.

[Christopher C.M. Cooke]

Thank you Jeff, Dean and all for your help here, it is much appreciated.