A pair came over to check out a mongoose chasing a gecko out of it's hole. These are the first I've seen in Maui so I was quite interested in seeing them. Although late in the evening I took a few shots.
Nikon D300s
500 f4
400 ISO
F4 @ 1/25
I have been accused of sharpening too much:) so this is basically full frame with a little sharpening.
For sharpening try doing in a layer, just control J then sharpen to taste, the erase bg sharpening with a layer mask.... then look at the bird and lower the opacity of the mask to taste. Always find it best to fine tune the image, going back and forth !!
Despite the number of branches the image came out well, would try to evict the one in focus branch on the left and blur the rest a bit more !!
You could also look at a bit of a vertical with more room on left than left.
It looks to me like the bird could use a bit more sharpening.
Interesting method described by Alfred. I also use layers and a bit of erasing to make sure i don't over do it. Hard to get right sometimes. I am finding that as I become more consistent in getting my shots the sharpening routine stays the same.
Good advice above; lots of potential in this image. The most important step is to build a clean mask that
isolates the subject and perch from the background:
With that, you can go to town, first setting white point on the bird and running S/H to open shadow details or increase midtone
contrast. Then invert that mask on a new (image) layer to blur the background. Use lens blur, not Gaussian blur! The former is the
only one that will work with a layer mask.
Hi Roy. For an environmental portrait, you got a fairly clean shot of the bird, IMO. David's repost is sweet, and of course without a distracting background, all of the attention is now on the bird.
Hello Alf. Thanks for the quick tip on sharpening. I have taken to using Nik output sharpener and then use the brush to paint on the sharpening, but it does just what you say on another layer so I can erase where needed. I am using my laptop here in Maui so I didn't do much on this image. Hope to get more shots of these birds in better light, but I don't think I did to bad at 1/25 sec hand held. Mind you this was the only one that came out sharp.:D
Thanks Dave, can't believe you think it needs to be sharpened.:D That's why I posted it really to test my sharpening on the macbook. I, like you, think it needs more but I was being conservative.
Dave, thanks very much for the mini tutorial. I have learned much from your posts as well as all the other who share their work flow. Great repost by the way.
Maui Mockingbird?
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