White Throated Sparrow

[Bob Decker]

I decided to stay in the backyard this morning instead of going for a morning hike. There are a few recent visitors to my feeders I was hoping to get a shot of. Unfortunately the birds I'd been planning to photography wer no shows. I set-up my Outhouse blind the evening before with the idea of that the birds might be less shy of it if it was in place as the sun came up. Anyway, heres a shot of a White Throated Sparrow.

40D, Bigma 50-500 @ 500, ISO 1600, f/7.1, 1.200 (ev +.67), CF tripod, sidemount gimbal. RAW conversion via CS3 ACR with boost to Clarity, Vibrance & Saturation. In PS selective sharpening of bird, additional sharpening of eye, despeckle and reduce noise on background, some cloning of distractions. Additional noise reduction in Noiseware Community Edition. Not a spectacular shot... but pleasant I think. Looking forward to hearing C&C.

[kostas nianiopoulos]

Hi Bob u are verry lucky get images from your own home's yeard , i can't do that as i live in apartment .
i have re-adjusted the colors a bit with the levels in cs4 i have the bar where was color information , and box blur selective around the bird , have a look if u like .
goodnight or whatever is there , here is 5 AM .. see you around ..

[Desmond Chan]

Looking forward to hearing C&C.

Hi Bob, for some reason your image looks very bright on my monitor. I went back and did some adjustment to it and the result is as attached. It appears to me that this image does not have a lot of good details. Not sure if it's because of post-processing or it's a big crop of the original.

I personally don't really mind the fence in the background. Like the pose of the bird and your placement of the bird in the photo.

Thanks for sharing !

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Bob,
I like the close up pose with the sharp eye contact, your bird is placed just right in frame. It is a tad on the bright side and your whites are hot with lack of details. Your feather details are smudged possibly due to your noise reduction process or post processing. Looking forward to your next one, keep them coming...:cool:

[Bob Decker]

The details are smudged due to the high ISO/noise I believe. You're right, it was a bit bright as presented. I was past due on monitor calibration and didn't realize how far it had gotten out! However, color rendition and brightness looks much different uploaded than on my computer, even after calibration. I wonder if Noiseware saves in the aRGB colorspace instead of sRGB? Something odd is definately going on with my last two uploads/posts. They both look more statureated... richer on my computers than when uploaded! I think Noiseware will be taken out of my workflow.

I personally liked the pattern the chan link created... but that's a matter of taste I'm sure. Because of the lack of detail I was considering taking the image into Corel Paint and creating a painterly interpretation of the image, but then ran across the Fotosketcher link posted in a thread here and thought I'd play with that. Certainly much quicker than playing in Paint:

[Jeff Cashdollar]

I like the Fotosketcher look and I agree with the ISO comment. ISO 1600 seem high for the 40D but different situations can create different settings.

[Bob Decker]

I like the Fotosketcher look and I agree with the ISO comment. ISO 1600 seem high for the 40D but different situations can create different settings.

It's always a balancing act between a usable shutter speed, the lowest ISO possible for noise considerations, and an aperature setting to provide good detail and pleasing bokeh... and the latter is always challenging with the Bigma. ;) The 40 D does pretty decent at high ISOs for photographing people at parties, wedding receptions, etc., but you're not dealing with big crops and fine feather detail in those situations. Plus you can always convert to black & white where the noise becomes an artistic film grain look. Avian photography is certainly a different matter.

Fotosketcher is neat. It would've taken a lot of work to have "painted" that using Corel Paint... but would've been more an actual "piece of art" because of the hand worked creation. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Bob When you set up your blind try setting also a perch with bg Will make all the difference having a clean bg !! .. ISO wise don't mind going to a high setting for making a sharp image, clean up with Noiseware looks good !!! ... just check histogram closely, just a little over !!