Rose-breasted Grosbeak

[Richard Stern]

A lovely and fairly common bird here in Summer, with a lovely song. Approx. 15% crop, some sharpening, curves, oof branches in bg removed.

Camera Model: NIKON D70s
Lens: 300.0 mm f/4.0 +1.4TC hand-held
Focus Distance: 5.62m
Aperture: f/7.1
Exposure Time: 0.0025 s (1/400)
ISO equiv: 800
Exposure Bias: none
Metering Mode: Matrix
Exposure: aperture priority (semi-auto)
White Balance: Auto
Light Source: Unknown
Flash Fired: No
Color Space: sRGB

Thanks for looking.

Richard

[Scott Frye]

Bird is sharp and has nice colors but the background is a bit too bright for my tastes and distracts my attention from the bird

[Myer Bornstein]

I would darken the background and remove the extra catch lights in the eye otherwise 4 plus image

[Aidan Briggs]

Good advice above, although I would leave the catchlight since it is a reflection of the sky. The blacks look pretty noisy: you might try backing off on sharpening a little.

Looking forward to more!!

[Randy Stout]

Richard:

Colorful fellow in nice condition. Sharp.
Based on the amount of noise in the blacks, I would guess that you significantly underexposed the bird, and then had to increase the exposure in post to compensate, and this brought up the noise.
He probably would have benefitted from +1 or so +EC. The background would have gone pretty bright, but that is probably easier to deal with in post then the noise induced.
Just something to consider next time you are in this shooting situation.

Cheers

Randy

[Susan Candelario]

He is one beautiful bird. Good comments already noted above.

[James Salywoda]

Beautiful bird and bg it suffers from a bit to much noise.

[Dave Kilpatrick]

Agree with comments above. I would try to give the bird a little more space to the right. One of my tendencies is to get too tight on the subject.