Backyard setup. Sony A700, 70-400G @400mm, f5.6, 1/320, iso1600, tripod, Very cloudy, early morning. NR on BG, cropped for comp, levels, curves, sharpen bird.
Hi Peter - Nice setup! Techs look solid and nice at 1600ISO!
Sharp and exposure looks spot on to my eye's.
Maybe just a tad large in the frame for my tastes - I might have tried to position him more to the left leaving more room in front than behind (By moving around the the left a little perhaps.
Still only a minor thing - Lots to like here!!
Keep em coming :)
First, it appears that it's cropped a bit too hard causing noise in the bill, wings, wing coverts, and tail. It's probably throughout the bird, but it shows up in the places with smoother surfaces than the fine details of the body feathers. think opening up the crop a bit might help control that.
It also looks a bit too sharpened to me. I believe this can also increase noise.
Thanks, Lance and Paul for your comments.
Paul, My original of this image looks a lot better, noise wise. I ran usm on the re-sized image and probably should not have.
Peter
Love the portrait Peter. Your setup is productive! I am OK with the space given to the bird but would crop some off the right. I see some "scratchy" noise in the bill, feathers and eye. This is tough to remove because it's buried in the detail. I have found the Topaz Denoise often works to reduce noise but not detail in these situations.
Thanks, John. I struggle with the balance between sharpness, noise and crop, but I'll keep trying.
My set up has been very productive. In a one hour time span the other day I counted 14 different species at my feeders. Some of them just dont like my perches.
Peter
I think it has been cropped too hard (I like Paul's description!) for the butter butt (what we call these birds around here). Until you get noise under control, either by shooting technique or NR, sharpening will only make it worse. Sharpening increases edge contrast at the expense of noise.
If it was very cloudy you should have been able to push exposure considerably and control noise better. I would experiment, which should be easy since you don't have to travel far, and try some bracketing and overexpose varying degrees, drop the exposures to normal in PP, and examine noise profiles in the images to get an idea how much you can overexpose and get away with. regards~Bill
Yellow-rumped Warbler
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