Bue Jay

[Joel Eade]

Set up using food, shot taken from my basement (door open)

1D MKIV
700mm
Manual mode
Tripod
Evaluative metering
ISO 2000
f/5.6
1/320
580 EXII + Better Beamer manual power at 1/128

[Sid Garige]

Joel,

Perfectly balanced light on background and subject. Every thing came together very well.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Joel,

Background and subject colors are wonderful and a very regal pose. There are a few opportunities here, I might take a small layer off the bottom and evict the knot on the bottom right hand side. Detail is not bad but could be sharper in the head/eye area (how much crop) and I assume the high ISO was due to low light. Not sure you need such high ISO with a BB too. At such low power, I might make the flash stronger and less ISO,. lets see what other say.

As always thanks for posting you are very active on this forum and I always enjoy your work.

[Joel Eade]

Joel,

Background and subject colors are wonderful and a very regar pose. There are a few opportunities here, I might take a small layer off the bottom and evict the knot on the bottom right hand side. Detail is not bad but could be sharper in the head/eye area (how much crop) and I assume the high ISO was due to low light. Not sure you need such high ISO with a BB too. At such low power, I might make the flash stronger and less ISO,. lets see what other say.

As always thanks for posting you are very active on this forum and I always enjoy your work.

Thanks Jeff, I appreciate your critiques, you are very helpful.

I cropped some from the left and right for composition but none from the top or bottom so overall the crop isn't much. I was probably 25 feet away and was using 700mm so the bird and perch just about filled the frame vertically.

It was very low light, early morning, overcast. I could have used more flash, I agree, but I was just trying for a very slight fill.

I could sharpen this image more without any problem I believe....this is the one area that I always seem to get comments one way or another so I am still looking for that perfect balance.

To my eyes the images do not appear as sharp after uploading to this site as they do when I am seeing them on my MacBook Pro. There in is the problem for me....it seems I am trying to anticipate how much the image will change before I upload it and I can't get it just right.

[John Chardine]

You really have a consistently good setup Joel! Good comments so far. Re. uploading, I have never noticed any change in sharpness after an upload to BPN. The only time it occasionally happens is if you try to upload an image larger than the 250kb limit, in which case vBulletin sometimes will try to resample the image, and does a poor job. I don't think this is happening here. Do you downsample with Image size, sharpen, then Save for Web and Devices? I find this is a fool-proof workflow for BPN prep.

[Joel Eade]

You really have a consistently good setup Joel! Good comments so far. Re. uploading, I have never noticed any change in sharpness after an upload to BPN. The only time it occasionally happens is if you try to upload an image larger than the 250kb limit, in which case vBulletin sometimes will try to resample the image, and does a poor job. I don't think this is happening here. Do you downsample with Image size, sharpen, then Save for Web and Devices? I find this is a fool-proof workflow for BPN prep.

Thanks John. No I am not downsampling (I don't think)...

I use image size (bicubic sharpener) to get 1024 pixels wide or 800 pixels tall. Then save as jpeg and adjust the quality so the file is less than 250 kb.

[John Chardine]

Hi Joel- Forgive me for using the jargon term "downsampling" without definition. What I mean is taking your full-res image and using Image size to make it smaller by combining pixels in various ways. That's what you do. Upsampling is the reverse where you make more pixels out of what you have.

I think I see the problem in your workflow- I discovered this quite a while ago. When you "Save as" a jpeg in Ps you can change the quality or degree of compression. When you dial in a quality figure, say 8, Ps pauses for a moment and gives you an estimate of the file size. Here's the kicker- it almost always underestimates the file size so for example, if you adjust quality such that Ps says the file will be 245kb, then check on your disk, you will find the file size quite a bit bigger and probably over the BPN limit. At least this is what I find running CS4 and 5 on a Mac. So maybe you are suffering from the dreaded vBulletin resample?! To combat this I have long since used Save for Web and Devices, which does not underestimate file size- if you dial in 245kb, you get that or a little bit less due to rounding error. I would strongly recommend using Save for Web and Devices.