Colour Coordination - Male Purple Finch

[Stephen Stephen]

I created this image during the Mother's Day weekend while visiting my parents in New Brunswick. Their property is planted with a mixture of spruce, pine, fruit trees and shrubs. The back edge of their property is bordered by a very small Alder covered stream. They also have several feeders up making it a good place to find birds.

I haven't had any good opportunities to photograph Purple Finches for several years. Although a regular visitor to my yard inthe past, they seem to have disappeared now so I was happy to have an opportunity to photograph this one.

I attracted it to the flowering crabapple tree with the discrete use of a recorded call.

Canon EOS 40D, Sigma 50-500mm at 500mm, 1/320 sec, f/6.3, ISO Equiv.: 640 no flash. Image was cropped (perhaps too tightly??) to eliminate some distracting branches.

[Randy Stout]

Stephen:

Great color match here! Sharp on the eye, well exposed.

To my eye, I would prefer not quite so much OOF foreground in the RLC, and that the bird didn't merge with the twig behind him. I think you can downplay the OOF elements in the RLC by doing a moderate vignette there. I also used the blur tool and very lightly increased the blur, to further downplay the buds. This left the color, but less of the eye pulling form.

A bit of noise showing up in the background. Looser crop would probably worsen the OOF elements, so I think you were correct on that decision.

Tough to get really clean images without a setup!

Cheers

Randy

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the alert pose, eye contact and soft light and wish the branch in the foreground were not there.

[Daniel Cadieux]

For me the only issue is the FG flowers blocking the feet, but I love the feel and colours of the image. I can't believe hoe closely matched those colours from the flowers and finch are...very neat! I like the comp and I don't feel it is too tight.

[Stephen Stephen]

Thank you Randy, Axel, Dan and Peter for your comments and suggestions. I agree that the foreground branch in particular is distracting. I will try and play with some of the adjustments you mentioned.

Although there were some more open perch position on the tree the bird chose his own places to land and I was just pleased to combine him with the blossoms. I do have some other images of him on a spruce tree where he is more fully visible and the BG is less distracting.

All in all I was pleased to create some images of this species after a four year drought in my photo collection.