Dark-eyed Junco

After Saturday’s disappointing results at a wildlife refuge, I was starting to consider dumping the Sony. However, I tried it under controlled conditions on a tripod and the image quality with the 200-600 + the 1.4 Teleconverter was excellent, so I took it out to my blind this morning and mounted it to the tripod head I have on my window there. I’d also figured out what I’d done wrong with the focus settings. Results were much more consistent and pretty good for that much glass (1260 mm equivalent at full zoom).

What technical feedback would you like if any?

Very little processing on this one. Just cropped and removed a couple of dust bunnies, adjusted exposure levels and brought out feather texture a bit.

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

Anything.

Pertinent technical details or techniques:

Sony A6500, Sony 200-600 mm @ 600 mm + 1.4TC, Gimbal head mounted to blind window, f/9, 1/320, iso 2500. Processed in LR & PS CC. Neat Image for noise reduction and Topaz Detail for plumage enhancement. Taken at 8:48 this morning.

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Nice pose and the detail does look excellent. An interesting perch and great background. How much noise was there originally? I sure don’t see any now.

Excellent, Dennis. I like the inquisitive look from the bird and I do like the perch, too. The “nodules” on the perch seems to add playfulness to the character of the bird. I wish a bit of extra depth of field to the tip of the bill of the bird but understand that you may be limited by light.

Thanks for the comment, Adhika. Unfortunately, with this much glass, the depth of field becomes minuscule. It’s not really suitable for this close a range (under 6 meters) and at f/9 the dof was only 2 cm. F/16 would only have given me 4 cm, though that probably would have been enough and I still could 1/100 exposure, so that might have been a better option. 1/320 wasn’t enough to stop any motion anyhow, so going down from there wouldn’t have created very many more motion blurred images.

Allen: There was a reasonable amount of noise originally. As a comparison, I went back in my files and found another image taken in about the same place and same conditions with the 7DII. Neat Image gives me a single numerical value for noise level when I tell it to do an automatic noise profile. Of two very similar images on the Sony, one came it at 15.4 and the other at 17.5. The Canon came in at 17.2 I apply the Neat Image noise reduction to the entire image on a duplicate background layer as my first processing step after I export the file to Photoshop. For this level of noise, it gives me good results without significant loss of feather detail. By comparison of noise levels, if I remember correctly, an iso 500 image will give me somewhere in the 4-7 range for their noise level measurement.

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