Yellow Warbler

[Steve Deam]

My first time to capture a Yellow Warbler in my back yard in Indiana.

Canon 7D, 600mm, 1/2000 @ f 6.3, ISO 800

[Kerry Perkins]

Steve, congrats on this one - excellent work! I would love to see this posted at the maximum size of 1024 wide or 800 tall, whichever comes first. Excellent pose, head angle, color rendition, and exposure. Yellow is a very hard color to contain and you did a good job with that. Love the complimentary background and the sharpness of the bird. My only suggestion would be to crop from the left just enough to eliminate that one stray leaf. This would leave you with a square-ish crop, but I think that it would look just fine. Good show!

[Steve Deam]

Kerry,

Thank you for the critique. You're right the yellow was a challenge to conatin. Parts of it still look a little hot to me, but the histogram looks good. To keep the rectangular crop I decided to clone the stray leaf out.

Here it is at 800 tall... This is a very significant crop - maybe 20% of the original frame. I'm happy it held up as well as it did.

[Kerry Perkins]

Looks good Steve! Love the 7D.

[John Chardine]

Hi Steve- Good comments from Kerry. Love the image. The surroundings work well. With the little leaf gone you could nudge the bird to the left a little. There are some hot patches around the eye indicated by a value of 255 in the red channel. There are ways to deal with this especially if you shoot RAW. The Recovery slider in Adobe Camera Raw would be worth a try. Also bringing the exposure slider down a little and to compensate bringing the Fill light slide up also works well.

I'll add that a few hot pixels interspersed amongst lower-toned pixels just become part of the detail, and are thus IMO OK. It is when you have contiguous hot pixels forming patches with no detail where there should be (e.g., feathers) that the problem can be distracting.

[Paul Guris]

The bird looks really sweet. A little hotness in the yellows doesn't bother me for this species because it's the way you actually so often see them (as compared to, say, Kentucky Warbler which is a shade oriented species).

Looking at the image, I think I'd opt for a wider crop. I find the amount of noise in the OOF vegetation to be a bit jarring. Backing up a bit might tame that.

[David N Smith]

Nice capture Steve. Hopefully now that the weather is starting to warm up & dry out here in NE Indiana I can get some shots of birds in our area.
The yellow looks really good & I like the crop. Hopefully I can get something close to being that good.

Dave

[nancy hazen]

Beautiful composition Steve, and I love the Warbler. Those bright yellows are not easy, but the second one looks great.
Nancy

[Steve Deam]

Thank you all for your nice words and comments. The advice is very helpful.

[Ray Rozema]

I like the pose and eye contact. the perch and background match well The clipping of the yellows as mentioned. Agree with John move the bird to the left. Looks like there a halo around the bird ? sharpening artifact.