Tufted Titmouse

[Ronald Zigler]

Canon 60D, 300mm f4 + 1.4x, @ 1/1000, f5.6, ISO 1250, HH. Would a lower ISO have made a significant difference in the sharpness of this image? This is was minimally cropped.

[Joel Eade]

Sharpness is good on my monitor. The BG could use a little more NR and I might remove the little broken off branch on the left or perhaps darken it.

Looks like you got really close to this little guy. They are not always easy to capture, as I am sure you know, because are in almost constant motion.

[Linwood Ferguson]

There's some combination of a bit of noise or a bit of sharpening artifacts that are just visible on my monitor. It could be the sizing for the web however, hard to tell, look closely over the wing at the level of the eye, on my monitor there's a bit of pixelation of some sort. The colors are a great background and brings out the orange under the wing.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Ron,

This is really nice and the kind of picture I migrate towards. It is critical sharp and that is one of the most if not the most important of bird photography IMO. Here's the deal with ISO, when you double the number you gain a stop of light and as you know in low light we increase ISO to gain more light sensitivity this really helps when light is not at a premium. The noise in the background is probably due to the high ISO. I use 400 95% of the time and move to 800 when I need the light in early morning, evening and overcast situations.

I believe the most important thing is to get the image sharp, if that requires higher ISO then do it; others methods include flash (freeze action) wider aperture for faster shutter speed (you were maxed out with the TC). In this case I think your techniques were solid, assuming the high ISO was needed to bump-up the shutter due to low light. You could have used a lower ISO for example 625 but the shutter would drop to 1/500 and could retard the image detail. Now some might say 1/500 is enough but if you were HH'ing I would much rather be at 1/1000 on a tripod the 1/500 would be fine and the ISO could be reduced.

I like the selective focus shot with the wide aperture, very detailed shot and the focus on the bird and fine feather detail is outstanding - this is real nice. Run NR on the background and put it in the favorite file - nice job Ron!

[Cathy McEntee]

Real nice image--pose is great--agree with others about the noisy background.

[Ronald Zigler]

Thanks everyone. Now, I just need to learn how to run noise reduction on the background only.

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Ronald,

Greetings. Nice sharp detail needs the 1/1000th for handholding at the cost of the noise. The shadow on the bottom side of the ttm could also use some chroma noise reduction. Tough subject to get that close.

Cheers,

-Michael-