Comments on exposure, fixed aperture lens.
Compositions colors
(If backgrounds have been removed, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
Canon RP, RF-800mm, F-11, ISO 1250
1/1000 @ F-11
I like the pose and the autumn colors in the leaf below and how the curve of the leaf follows the waxwing. I must admit I tend to do a lot of pruning on shots like this, so I’d have removed the branches on the right and probably the leaf above the waxwing’s head. Parts of the waxwing appear a bit over-sharpened and the background colors don’t look natural to me, though that just might be my ignorance not knowing what was in the background.
The exposure looks really good. The fall colors are very nice although to my eye the waxwing seems a bit on the greenish side. That may just be me. Composition is fine and often personal preferences are a big part of things. I may have moved the bird a bit more left in the frame. and may have cloned out the lovely leaf in lower left part of photo. BG seems a bit noisy to me. Overall though it is a very nice photo.
Very nice fall setting and pose John. I don’t mind all the branches. I am seeing a lack of detail in some of the plumage, if you ran noise reduction on the whole image or if it’s a big crop that could be the cause.
An interesting lens idea Canon has there. reminds me of the old 500 mm f/8 lenses, except they were cheap (at least the one I could afford). I agree that the bird looks a little soft and I’m not sure why because the leaves and branches look nice and crisp. I’d probably do some pruning, though slightly different than what Allen mentioned, so I guess that’s just taste.
Dennis, thanks for your comments. I also years ago had one of those 500mm F-8, preset lens. It was what I could afford, and did OK.
John
A very nice subject in a nice setting, but I also see image quality issues that I suspect are not from the lens directly. Waxwings have very fine long, thin breast feathers that are difficult to render sharply. They also tend to have messed up breast feathers – at least the ones I try to shoot. Any slight camera shake could cause loss of detail, and noise reduction / sharpening could cause further problems.
Could you provide processing info?
Diane, It is a jpeg image, I use Adobe PSE-21. I really do not do much work on the image itself other than resizing, color correction and shadow and highlight. I do use Topaz Denoise. But, I believe not on this image. My computer skills are very basic. Even though I started out as a darkroom tech many years ago, processing by computer program is a challenge for me. But, I keep trying.
