On a recent photo workshop the instructor encouraged us to get out and shoot whatever wildlife we could find in our backyards. Well having no backyard, I headed to Central Park to test my newly repaired 7D. My most cooperative subjects were pigeons. I hope no one minds.
Canon 7D
70-200 f4 at 150mm
1/250
f4
ISO 800
HH and cropped.
Rachel, I don't mind a bit! It's the first time I've seen a pigeon in awhile - not many in Kansas City but we sure have our fill of Mourning Doves!
Not the perfect HA but I do like how you positioned him in the frame. Nice catch light in the eye and really nice detail on his feathers. Compositionally, I think you could also go vertical with this and crop out most of the BG to keep more focus on the bird. Another option would be to dial down the light areas of the BG enough that they still showed but weren't quite so prominent. You might also try adding a little surfact blur (filter/surface blur in PS) to the BG or run a little noise reduction to get it to smooth out even further.
Hi Rachel. Nice looking pigeon. I like the pose, and good sharp details. Maybe a touch of blue in the whites. I would vote for keeping the horizontal format, but cropping out about 1/3 of the space between the end of the tail and the RH edge of the frame. Agree with Jules that toning down the bright spots in the bg would help (maybe s/h tool on bg only, with 0 change in shadows and -10 or -15 in the highlights, or more). And maybe some blur. I'm a fan of getting the local birds.
Thanks Julie and Bill for the comments and suggestions. Here's a repost. Let me know if I went too far with the blur, this was my first time really using it. Julie - btw I took several that were portrait oriented but actually liked this comp better.
I like the repost - it really gives the bird more presence! I also like the blur although you could back off of it a bit and go for a nice BG of trees but this also works.
NYC's Most Prevalent Bird
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