Female Red-headed Barbet photographed at Tandayapa Lodge, Ecuador in January 2012. Bird attracted to feeder with fruit. I love the light spectrum spreading across the background, with many of the colors represented in the bird's plumage. At the risk of over-personification, barbets always look old and wise to me.
Canon 1D Mk IV, 300mm f/2.8 + 1.4X, ISO 800, 1/320", f6.3, tripod, flash
Beautiful capture and agree the background is stunning. I wonder what kind of fruit the lodge uses. They won't come to my bananas, only fruiting ficus trees.
Wow, that is a beautiful female. I love all of the colors she has in her feathers, you did an outstanding job capturing them. I spent a week at that lodge a few years back and never saw anything like this.
I've incorporated the three major suggestions (all good) in this repost. The biggest win is lightening the out of focus tree directly behind the bird. This was fairly easy, using the dodge brush to selectively lighten shadow and mid-tones. I should have done a bit more at the bottom, but it was getting tedious. I blurred most of the background, but only superficially and the result is similar to an increase in noise reduction. A big blur, that blends adjacent color bands, would be very major surgery and very tedious in areas adjacent to the bird. Less flash and more ambient light, is also quite difficult after the fact, but I took a stab at it with photoshop post-processing tools.
As far as the fruit used to attract the Barbets, it was papayas. The feeder was also visited by Blue-winged Mountain Tanagers, Lemo-rumped Tanagers and Thick-billed Euphonias.
Colorful Barbet & Background
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