Kissing Cardinals
Canon 1D MK III
Canon 300mm 2.8 IS
1.4x teleconverter
400 ISO
1/250
f 5.6
The male cardinal was scooping up sunflower seeds during the spring as I waited for another bird to return to a perch. The cardinal then hopped up on the downed tree and was quickly joined by his mate. She leaned over to him and he fed her the seeds, locking beaks in the process. I wish the BG were more OOF, but it was an unexpected situation. c/c welcome.
Gary:
Nice story and the image shows the interaction well. The perch works well. Yes, agree about the slightly busy background.
On my monitor the reds in the male look oversaturated, and I suspect the histogram would show issues in the red channel.
Nice avatar by the way!
Cheers
Randy
Hi Gary,
Nice interaction you captured. I like that you can see the eyes of both birds. The green leaves in the background compliment the reds very nicely.
On my monitor the image appears to be a little over saturated. I toned down the reds by adding a bit of cyan to the reds in selective colors. I also desaturated the reds and greens in hue/saturation. Before these adjustments the red channel was clipped and the blue channel was blocked.
I used a dodge and burn layer to tone down some of the lighter leaves and perch a little.
For my taste the perch is a little large. To de-emphasize the perch I cropped some off the bottom.
I leave it up to you if these adjustments are an improvement or not and still reflect what you saw you the field.
Thanks for sharing.
PS Randy is obviously faster at typing than I am. Sorry for repeating the comments on the reds.
Wonderful capture of a sweet moment and I think that Phil's tweaks make it shine. Thanks for sharing this one!
What great interaction you have captured, Phil offers a great repost. I hope to see more of your images.
Thanks for the repost and comments on the reds. The image looks much better with the extra cropping as well. Back to the drawing board to work on those changes. Thanks to all for your kind words. Gary
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