Head angle be darned, this is my first image ever of a Cerulean Warbler, and I am sooooooo glad to open up a folder of this species in my files! I briefly tried audio, expecting it to stay way up in the canopy anyhow (as per usual), but this time it came right down to eye level! The leaves have grown too much at this point, so almost every image has it half concealed behind foliage. Except this one. And of course it is looking away a bit. It's OK, it encourages me to try for this species again next spring.
Canon 7DII + 500mm f/4 II + 1.4TC III, manual exposure, evaluative metering, 1/1250s., f/5.6, ISO 400, natural light, handheld, cropped for composition, some highlights on the leaves tamed. Shadowing on the throat, chest, and belly lifted (boy was I hoping for clouds at this point, but not to be).
Last edited by Daniel Cadieux; 05-31-2020 at 10:53 AM.
Reason: fixed typo
Congratulations! A hard bird to get, and one of my many nemeses. A nice pose, well framed, and nice job mitigating the light. They do like it high in the canopy; but like you I have had them respond to audio only to perch on a partially obstructed branch. So I, too, would be pleased to have this one. I've only gotten one decent shot of one, and that required some PP trickery to clear the obstructions.
Beautiful bird, never have run across one. The head looks pretty sharp, It would have been nice if the wing was a little sharper. Too bad you didn't have time to bump the iso to increase shutter speed and or aperture.
Yeah, this is one of the hardest warblers to photograph, so I would have kept this frame despite the head angle as well. Detail on the bird is great. More DOF across bird might have been nice
but that's relatively minor.