These Woodpeckers are a dime a dozen here and I have too many pictures of them, but this one struck a pose I rather liked while there was some reasonably filtered light through trees up the hill behind me. She is undoubtedly contemplating chasing the other birds away from the feeder. Added canvas on the bottom and top, cropped from horizontal.
Specific Feedback Requested
All comments welcome!
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Canon R5, 100-500 + 2X at 686mm, 1/250, f/13, ISO 4000. Minor tonal adjustments in LR, Topaz Denoise and minor cloning to clean the bill and perch.
The red top-knot looks really good, Diane. It’s always hard to achieve the right saturation in those. I’m not sure why you’re not getting a larger image. I think you usually upload pretty large files, so you might just have to wait several minutes if the server is busy.
@Karl_Zuzarte, I probably have some with that slightly different pose, but I didn’t get the chance today. Will look through the archives. LR tells me I have over 600, and I delete A LOT.
Diane, you really got a beautiful shot of this guy. He stands out so nicely against that smooth background. Someone just fixed theirs that wouldn’t enlarge by changing to sRGB, they had first posted their image as RGB and wouldn’t enlarge.
Thanks, @Shirley_Freeman. I have a preset to export from LR at a good size for NPN and it converts to sRGB. But I don’t think there is any possibility that having an incorrect color profile could affect uploading of the larger file. Some glitch would have occurred for for this other person on the first upload that didn’t happen on the second attempt. That’s why I tried again.
The color profiles just affect the color appearance of an image. The choices for most uses are Adobe RGB (1998), sRGB and ProPhoto RGB. There is not a plain “RGB”. sRGB is the one that insures correct color interpretation by more browsers and fits the color gamut of more monitors.
There are other color spaces than the RGB ones – CMYK is for print with 4 ink colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) and there is a grayscale for B/W, although you can also use one of the RGB spaces for B/W with the risk of color contamination.
But this still won’t enlarge for me – does it for other people? Today some images wouldn’t display in the initial post screen (just a a very blurred version) but would enlarge.
I’m on a Mac. I normally use Firefox. I just logged in with Safari and can’t even see some of the initial images in some of the posts, including this last one of mine, and those won’t enlarge – instead of a blurry image I see an icon with 2 overlapping circles with a tail – looks like a duck head profile or those “balloons” for speech text in a cartoon.
We have fast and stable fiber internet so I doubt the problem is on my end. I’ve seen data transfer oddities with this site before.
It’s gorgeous - and like my white tailed deer shot, sometimes we overlook the beauty and grace in something we see all the time. The lines of the bird are so crisp and defined and I like that the feet show as well. Woodies aren’t great perchers because of their foot construction.
@Kris_Smith, I didn’t know that about woodpeckers – thanks for the information! As much as I like to photograph birds, I am not by any means a birder. Maybe in my next life…
The availability of high speed internet came as a surprise to us. We are about 8 miles from downtown and the population out this way isn’t high, unless you count woodpeckers and rattlesnakes. We were told repeatedly that we would never have anything but satellite internet out here. But for some reason, maybe 3 years ago, ATT ran fiber optic cable along the north road from Santa Rosa toward Calistoga. We are only about half a mile off that road and the entire neighborhood got hooked up.
It was years after cell service became widespread that we could get a cell signal out here, too.
Diane, this is a good looking woodpecker. I like how it’s white eye and raised beak create a sense that it’s astonished. The NPN system has been being quite slow at times over the last few days. Sometimes that slowness leads to the lack of a larger view. This morning, I had to wait a minute (or maybe more, I didn’t time carefully) before the arrow pointer switched to the pointing finger. That pointing finger which that there’s now a larger version (or the system has finally loaded the full file that you created).
