Red on Red (house finch)

[Dave Blinder]

What bothers me most is that there are OOF branches obscuring the perch here. The shot was taken from a woodland trail, into someone's backyard and the only shot was through many branches. I've cloned out what I could. I intentionally left in the bit of "steel eye" from the flash, matter of taste I suppose.

Thanks for looking, Dave



Hackettstown, NJ

AV Mode + Fill flash

Camera: Canon EOS 40D
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/2000)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 700 mm
Exposure: 0.00
ISO Speed: 500
Exposure Bias: +2/3 EV
Flash: On, Fired

[Nicki Gwynn Jones]

Hi Dave,
I love the red on red idea. I think that the BG could be improved by being slightly smoothed-out in the ULC - I think that I can see repeating clone marks here. I'm sure that you could clone in some detail on the perch fairly easily, although I am certainly no expert in these matters!
Best,
Ncki

[Bill Dix]

Dave: Red on red works nicely for me. And I don't mind the OOF perch, although you might try a bit of sharpening just on the portion that appears in focus around the feet. The bird itself seems a bit oversharpened on my screen.

[Dave Blinder]

Nicki the patterns you see in the upper left are daylight breaks in red Maple leaves, I did some cloning in that corner but solid red doesn't portray the background correctly.

Cloning a solid object like a thick detailed and slanted branch and changing background doesn't seem feasible here. There is too much texture to recreate.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Blinder]

Dave: Red on red works nicely for me. And I don't mind the OOF perch, although you might try a bit of sharpening just on the portion that appears in focus around the feet. The bird itself seems a bit oversharpened on my screen.

Thank you for the comment Bill. I seem to be getting the "oversharpened" comment often lately. The truth is that the 500mm f/4 naturally reproduces extreme feather detail, especially when an image is uncropped as the majority of my bird photos are. The sharpening here is prob no more than a layer of 30% high pass opacity w/ minimal settings over an unedited RAW.

You can't find sharpening halos on my images because I barely sharpen at all :) Au natural.

[denise ippolito]

Dave, Nice colors in the image. I think the extra catchlights are a bit distracting amnd I would prefer the bird a bit more to the right.Agree w/ you regarding the perch. Nice HA for a lookback pose.

[Dave Blinder]

Dave, Nice colors in the image. I think the extra catchlights are a bit distracting amnd I would prefer the bird a bit more to the right.Agree w/ you regarding the perch. Nice HA for a lookback pose.

Thank you Denise, let me see if I can do some work on the eye catchlights.

As far as improving the comp, I had to shoot through an extremely narrow "Y" in a branch directly in front of me, to the left was a clump of branches that further obscured the perch and BG. Any focus on the Finch actually seemed impossible at first. After I did get Autofocus to kick in, the bird flushed after 3 hits of the fill flash :(

[Dave Blinder]

PS - I made a few soft chip notes to get the bird to glance at me for the shot. One of my "tricks of the trade" :)

[Manos Papadomanolakis]

nice looking bird with a beautiful pose....another vote for the bird a bit more to the right

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Dave, I dont find the little guy oversharpened, and in turn , you have captured good detail. Lovely pose, and I agree moving him to the right will work. You could also crop up from the bottom to just below the tail. That would get rid of some of the OOF perch, and the gap at the bottom between perch and frame. Just a thought.

[Arthur Morris]

Lots of good comments above but nobody mentioned what seems to me to be a big problem: as is common with over the shoulder images the sharp focus seems to be on the bird's butt leaving the face soft because of a lack of d-o-f.... Set up your own feeder and take control of the situation!

[Kiran Poonacha]

now I see the DOF issue guru.. but loved the colours in the frame..