Yellow Warbler

[Ronald Zigler]

Canon 60D, 300mm f4 L + 1.4x, 1/1000, f14, ISO 800, HH. All comments and suggestions appreciated. I suspect that my depth of field is too great.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Ronald,

This is a cute little guy and very colorful. The opportunity here is the other elements in the frame that could pull at the eye but I like the natural setting. Curious, did you clip the yellow on the color histogram might need a bit of desaturation, let's see what others say could be my monitor. Nice detail for HH and like the back/side view of the subject. You are correct about the DoF could have used a smaller aperture every little bit helps. Thanks for posting, this is a beautiful species and the color is amazing.

[P-A. Fortin]

I also like the natural setting. There are always a bunch of leaves around these birds anyway so this looks familiar. The bird is in clear view so this is nice to me.

My monitor is calibrated and yellow is indeed clipped a bit. As Jeff mentioned, you could have used a smaller aperture to improve DOF but also to reduce your ISO. I see a good amount of noise on the background and a lower ISO might have helped in this area. I also have a 60D and I try to stick to ISO400 as a max unless I need a shutter speed below 1/800 (I prefer noise to blur!). I guess you have not used any NR on the background. This should improve the image alot.

[Ronald Zigler]

Using Adobe Photo Elements, is there a way to do a NR on the background only? I have never tried that.

[P-A. Fortin]

That I do not know, but I would expect it to be possible. In CS5, you can apply a filter (sharpening, noise reduction, etc..) to a selection. I perform selection on the bird, invert the selection to select "the rest" (the background) and then apply the filter.

If it is not possible in Elements, that would be disappointing in my humble opinion.