Back View

[Fred Canter]

I haven't had a lot of time available to get in the field or visit BPN. I was asked to get a back view shot of our endemic PR Tody for a local society and was able to capture this recently. I'm curious if this is the shot to use and comments on improvement.
This is also my first post by since becoming a member and uploading to BPN, so bear with me if I goof up.

Nikon D3s, 1/250, ISO 500, 600VR f/4, 1.4 TC, with flash because they are always in dark shade. Cropped by removing roughly 40% of photo, slight curve adjustment, selective sharpening on the eye but nowhere else as the feathers can become over-sharpened easily on this bird.

[Peter Farrell]

Great image, beautiful bird. A great lokk back pose and detail. I might delete the catch light (flash?) from the center of the eye. I am not familiar with this bird, but the perch looks a little large.
Peter

Please critique my image, I need all the help I can get

[RichardCurtin]

Good placement, nice diagonal perch, sharp, good eye contact, beautiful colors, and nice background. Can't think of much to critique... Agree re modifying the eye to have one catch light. Did they specify to have the bird looking over it's right or left shoulder? Very nice image.

[Fred Canter]

Great image, beautiful bird. A great lokk back pose and detail. I might delete the catch light (flash?) from the center of the eye. I am not familiar with this bird, but the perch looks a little large.
Peter

Please critique my image, I need all the help I can get

Good idea on the catch light, I see how the image looks with a change. The perch is a a normal perch in the particular area I'm shooting in. Other areas they will perch on smaller branches but there are so many twigs it's difficult to get clear shots. The area this is from I'm able to consistently photograph them with clean backgrounds, but the perches are always the same plant.

Critiqued your image, hope you find some use in what I said.

[Fred Canter]

Good placement, nice diagonal perch, sharp, good eye contact, beautiful colors, and nice background. Can't think of much to critique... Agree re modifying the eye to have one catch light. Did they specify to have the bird looking over it's right or left shoulder? Very nice image.

Good idea on the catchlight, I didn't catch that point, guess that's why I post here. I don't have specifications on direction, but do have multiple shots looking either way, up, down, etc. I just liked the angle on this shot, but will show them several different shots and let them pick. The best part is that it took two years to find this location, but now that I've found it I can shoot them every day if wanted as it's only a five minute drive to see them.

[arash_hazeghi]

excellent colors and what a beautiful bird, too bad the image quality isn't great, is it a huge crop?

[Fred Canter]

excellent colors and what a beautiful bird, too bad the image quality isn't great, is it a huge crop?

It's 60% of the frame and quality suffered a lot when I saved it for BPN upload. Still working out the correct way to save to upload to here. The .tiff looks much better.

[arash_hazeghi]

It's 60% of the frame and quality suffered a lot when I saved it for BPN upload. Still working out the correct way to save to upload to here. The .tiff looks much better.

Hope you can fix it, it might be heavy compression use "save for web" in PS

[Fred Canter]

Hope you can fix it, it might be heavy compression use "save for web" in PS

Will do, thanks for the tip. You had me wondering and I just spent some time looking at the high resolution photo. Which is in .psd and I was actually working on .jpg to upload and it is all a compression problem and me not having a work flow down to upload here. Off to figure out how to get the right parameters setup to save for here.

[Arthur Morris]

Arash is right on. I love the pose, the image design, and the colors but SH and IQ are not up to snuff as presented....

[John Chardine]

Fred- Make sure the image is saved at around 190kb, and of course 1024 or less wide and 800 or less high. If the image was uploaded to BPN > 200kb sometimes the system will take hold and mangle the image to make it smaller. To get it under 200kb you have to use jpeg compression. I second the use of Save for Web and Devices in Ps. It works great. Look forward to seeing the repost.

[DanWalters]

Great color in the background. Compliments the green in the bird.