Eastern Phoebe

[Ken Janes]

The Phoebes have returned to Maine. There were a pair building a nest near a pool in the deep shade. A little sunlight happened to fall on this one. I had the camera set to ISO 200 instead of 400 but still got a reasonable image. I decided to try a vertical crop of about 50% and removed a branch from behind the bird.

Canon 7D EF400mm f/5.6 1/320 @ 5.6 ISO 200 Handheld Level adjustments and sharpening.

[Richard Stern]

Hi,

I would suggest cropping so that the bird is a bit more to the left and looking into the picture, and toning down the whites on the branch, and on the underparts of the bird - perhaps with the shadows/ highlights tool, - also, a slightly tighter crop, but to still include the tip of the branch.

Richard

[John Chardine]

I Ken- Love the almost duo-tone of the image and the simple design. I would bring the bird down and to the left a bit by shaving off the bottom and left sides.

Forgive me if I'm wrong but the bird has the distinct look of having noise reduction run on it. You get a silky, waxy look in the feathers. If this is what happened I would mask out the bird and just run NR on the BG. The detail in feathers is often so fine that NR just destroys it.

Great to have the spring migrants back isn't it!

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Ken, good advice above. The image does look soft and contrasty at the same time. The very bright areas of the breast and the perch, especially the lower part, are overpowering the rest of the image. A much softer light and exposure would help this one. Too bad about the ISO 200. You could have used shutter speed in this situation for sure and the image is overexposed. ISO 400 would have given you 1/640 and the same exposure, but I would probably be shooting this scenario at f/5.6@1/1250 or some such.

[Ken Janes]

Thanks for the helpful comments. I have to work on NR on just the BG because that is exactly what happened.

Ken