Red Bellied woodpecker
This is on a dead tree setup. Cloned a piece of corn from the beak, very small crop.
I tried more sharpening but it looked crispy. 1/250, f5.6, iso400, sb900 flash
Nikon D700, 300mm, 1.4tc, tripod. White balance adjustment in acr, usm in cs3.
Very small levels in cs3.
Jack
Good one Jack, I like this a lot! Excellent use of fill flash for a nice, evenly lit image. Exposure, detail (the sharpness looks fine to me), color, and background. Super use of a setup. It might be better if there were less tree, as in moving the bird to the right in frame but I understand you might not have the canvas and it is not a big concern. Nice work!
"It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart, and head." - Henri Cartier Bresson
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Really like this, one of my favorite birds. The general rule is 1/3 background, 1/3 bird and 1/3 tree. Nice detail for a relatively slow shutter - keep em coming.
Hi Jack- "Too much tree" is often a problem with woodpeckers because they face the tree and you want to give more room in that direction. This is a nice one. Shows the bird off really well. For my taste it is a little over-flashed- how was your flash set up and did you use any flash exposure compensation?
Nice photo, it doesn't look too "flashed" to me, I agree about too much tree, but it is really sharp and the bird looks great.
Dan Kearl
Perhaps I should explain why I think the image is over-flashed a little. The main issue is the tonality of the BG compared to the bird itself. A bit more of a balance here and the effect would have been better. You want flash to be unobtrusive. In essence you want an image to look natural with no evidence of a flash being used. This is the ideal and the goal. A dead give-away to the use of flash is shadows and light angle- here you can see the shadow of the claws on the tree from a very low-angled light source; i.e., the flash.
Thank you all. John I used an sb900 mounted on the camera hot shoe, ITTL, no flash exposure
compensation. I was very close and slightly below the bird. Thanks
Jack
Thanks Jack. The details are useful. On my Canon flash system (Nikon may be different), I would likely have set a -1 2/3 stops into the flash. This usually gives a very pleasing flash effect. The actual compensation set on the flash depends on a lot of variables. I might not compensate at all if the sun is bright and overhead and I am trying to compete with this to fill some shadows, and/or I have H-synch set because I want to use a SS higher than the synch speed. In the same conditions with flying birds at some distance I may switch to manual mode in the flash and give full blasts of 1/1 power.
Thanks for your time and input John.
Jack
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