Grackle

[Joel Eade]

1D MKIV
500mm
Hand held
ISO 800
1/320
f/7.1

[allanrube]

I like the perch, pose, bg, and radiance.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Joel,

This is a nice and simple and regal image. A species that is beautiful with stunning colors but not photographed that often. Nice detail for 1/320 and HH, what was your distance. The muted background complements the image and I like the transition of color. Like it as presented.

[Joel Eade]

Joel,

This is a nice and simple and regal image. A species that is beautiful with stunning colors but not photographed that often. Nice detail for 1/320 and HH, what was your distance. The muted background complements the image and I like the transition of color. Like it as presented.

Thanks Jeff, I was sitting at the edge of a lake mostly for images of ducks when this bird landed on the little stump in the water about 20 feet to my right.

The light was really nice (late afternoon) and I was able to get 4 or 5 frames before he left.

[Cathy McEntee]

Beautiful image Joel-perch, pose, detail very nice, as usual!

[Kerry Perkins]

Super image Joel! Sweet light for sure and the iridescence really pops. I've seldom seen such a good rendition of the bronze areas of the bird. You have mentioned sharpening in previous posts, and I do think you tend to push it a bit. The sharpening on the bird looks good, but the technique you are using is leaving those sharpening halos. When you separate your layers for NR and sharpening, do you make two new layers and keep the original bg layer?

[gary ellwein]

The sweet light really brings out the colors. The soft, clean, muted bg compliments the subject. You scored a hat trick of light, good bg and subject in this one. I'm learning that if one approaches a shot with these three variables considered in order, the percentage of keepers increases.

Gary

[Joel Eade]

Super image Joel! Sweet light for sure and the iridescence really pops. I've seldom seen such a good rendition of the bronze areas of the bird. You have mentioned sharpening in previous posts, and I do think you tend to push it a bit. The sharpening on the bird looks good, but the technique you are using is leaving those sharpening halos. When you separate your layers for NR and sharpening, do you make two new layers and keep the original bg layer?

I convert with ACR to a 16 bit tiff with minimal sharpening defaults then after I am finished with all other processing I use Topaz In Focus but again usually at minimum settings.

I then run NR on the BG usually by selecting the BG and using Refine Edge. I use Topaz Denoise for NR.

I convert to 8 bits and save the full size tiff file.

I then use image size, bicubic sharpener, to reduce to 1000 pixels wide then save that as a jpeg for the web. Occassionally I will use a very low setting of smart sharpen on the jpeg, like 20% at 0.2 pixels. Did not use it on this image.

I am beginning to think that I just like over-sharpened images compared to other folks