Eager to Learn Spotlight Image Pat Lillich for week ending 2/11/2011 - South Texas Cardinals
Congratulations Pat Lillich for your image "South Rexas Cardinal" being chosen as the Eager to Learn Spotlight Image for the week ending 2/11/2011!!!
Last week Alan and i got to attend one of Alan Murphy's workshops down in South Texas. It was incredible! The first two days were freezing, literally - there was snow on the ground (we were told it had been 60 years since the last time it snowed) and the second morning there was a thin layer of ice on the branches.
Alan M. showed us how he set up his perches and talked about the various things we need to consider when we try to do our own - and then set us down to shoot. There were both largish birds like green jays and small birds like Titmice coming in - and I was getting pretty frustrated because I always seemed to have the 1.4 tc on when the big birds were there, and off when there were only small ones. At one point - Alan M. suggested that if the subject was too large for the lens, to take multiple frames and stitch them together in photoshop afterwards. and I pretty much just laughed at the idea i would think to do that.
the "Ah Hah!" moment hit when these two cardinals landed on this frozen branch and there was no way I could get the whole thing in the frame. So I quickly took pictures of the top and bottom birds and just hoped that i could do something with it.
Yesterday I picked 2 of the possible images, processed them the same in LR and pulled them into CS5 and stitched them together - discovered that I had chopped the top off the perch, so had to pull in a third one. Its a huge file. Ended up cloning out a few random bits of greenery and the end of one branch that traveled out of the frame. Ran noise reduction on the background, resized it for web , and ran unsharp mask on the birds and perch a few times.
The head angle and attitude of the two birds aren't perfect, they look pretty irritated with each other, but I was so excited to see what he had said to do - actually work!
canon 7d, 300 f2.8 + 1.4 tc at 420 mm. ISO 800, 1/160 sec at f/5.6, aperture priority, tripod. Birds came to a feeder that is off to one side.
thank you for looking, appreciate any comments and suggestions for improvement.
hey guys - thank you all for your kindness! this was a great learning experience- Alan Murphy showed how to get the image right, in a single shot - but I really appreciate that he also showed how to work with what you could get to bring together the image I wasn't fast enough to capture.
Eager to Learn Spotlight Image Pat Lillich for week ending 2/11/2011 - South Texas Cardinals
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