At least I hope so.
As common as they are, I enjoy photographing them, they are hard to get right for me.
A typical cat tail perch in the Wetlands.
1/640
f5
iso400
420mm (300f2.8 w/ 1.4x)
Nikon D7000
DSC_7938nx2.jpg
Sooper exposure and plenty sharp !!! The perch looks a bit different as it starts from being quite thin and then broadens a bit . Also the second leg seems to end abruptly .
Good pose and HA. Great perch.
Anyone else seeing white sharpening artifacts around the bill, upper back, legs on full screen image ?
A little too much color noise in the feathers and bill for my taste (feathers can appear irridescent but bill isn't). Was this image underexposed and the range expanded to brighten the image?
Hi Dan, cool pose with the open beak, and that beak sure looks like it could do some damage. Im with Don on the sharpening halo, and the blacks do look they have been recovered. I also feel there is a bluish cast on the blacks, and I desaturated the cyans which seems to bring the colours slightly back to black.
Nice details and pose on this one. The moment I opened it up, I observed a problem, although I wasn't sure what it was. To me it appears as though it needs a contrast boost but Stuart is probably on target. I would guess the RAW file can be worked on to make it really pop.
Stuart
You are correct -- that's part of the color noise I was citing. Its more channels than cyan though.
I ran his jpg using both Nik's detail aware noise reduction, and separately using Imagenomic's noise software - both served well to clean up the noise without too much detail loss. As Marina says, the Raw is what is needed for real processing.
Don and Stuart, thanks for the comments and the time to look.
The uncompressed file looks much better, I have had good luck recently compressing the files
for the web, but this one did not work as well.
As far as the color caste, I do see it, not sure why it is there.
I did bring up the exposure, but not that much.
I do find these guys challenging, just like white birds.
I try to underexpose black birds to keep feather detail, this one I did not do as well as I would have liked, because I had
a bright BG, not sunny, but water reflection.
Anyway, I liked the Trad. pose and will look at it again this evening, start over with the PP.
Hello Dan.
Real nice shot you have here. I really like the pose, great detail and perch.
I was always under the impression that on black birds one needed to overexpose just a tad. Guess I was wrong. You learn something new everyday.
Well done.
Robert, you are correct, I get my terms mixed up.
I tend to think of "over" as darker and "under" as lighter, which of course is just the opposite.
Yes, you should overexpose black birds.