Grasshopper sparrow

[P-A. Fortin]

A very very collaborative bird, obviously hired by Daniel Cadieux for the day I spent with him in Ottawa about a month ago. I can't believe this bird would have given me such a nice pose if I had been alone out there It was my first encounter with this species since it is very rare in Quebec. So I'm glad I was able to get such a good image as a souvenir.

Canon 60D, 100-400mm @ 350mm, f/5.6, ISO 400, 1/800, handheld, no flash, manual. Some very very minor exposure/contrast adjustments in Lightroom 4. No noise reduction (!) and very light sharpening (USM 20%, radius 0.2) in CS5.

[Cathy McEntee]

Hi P.-A. - beautiful pose on this bird and nice perch. I probably would have composed the image differently (taking more off the top and bottom and left side), but I like your comp as well. Nice job.

[Joel Eade]

Comp is fine to me, the pose is wonderful and it's very sharp. It looks overall a little too bright to me like it needs a levels adjustment or maybe some black added to the neutrals in the selective color adjustment.

[P-A. Fortin]

It is indeed very sharp. The tongue is very well defined in a 100% crop! But somehow I preferred the "full image" so I left it pretty much "as is".

It is true that the light was rather harsh. I played a bit with the contrast/curve but results looked too artificial to my taste. I have to admit that I did not consider playing with the blacks. I'll give it a try.

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi P-A., sweet capture of a great species to have in your collection. Love the singing pose and I agree with your decision to keep the frame intact. You don't have to settle for the harsh light in this case though. A little bit (maybe 3 minutes) of PS work for this repost. I used a curves adjustment (anti-contrast preset I made), a levels adjustment (moving the middle slider a tad to the right), and adding some black to the blacks, grays, and whites using selective color. I have presets that I made to do exactly this kind of image improvement, maybe I should share them... LR would have been a better place to do this however, as it doesn't work as well on JPEGs as you know. Good work on the capture!

[P-A. Fortin]

Indeed I get some much more interesting results with the adjustments you mention. Now my image looks much better and more like this : http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...493#post811493

Go ahead Kerry and share everything you got!

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

The original image is very well done. But I also like Kerry's version! the darker sky makes it more real or apealing to my eye.