I have male pileated woodpecker that shows up almost daily for a taste of our backyard suet block and I’m always hoping to get an inflight shot of him. Well, yesterday I managed to grab this shot of him taking off.
Shadows right? Background too cluttered? Composition?
D500, Nikon 200-500 lens, monopod, 1/1600th, 200mm ISO 1400, AI Sharpen, AI DeNoise, cropped to 2352 x 1759
Dave: I’m sure this was a pretty exciting moment to try to capture.
You specifically asked about a few things:
Shadows: They look like they have been pushed up to far and are muddy.
Background too cluttered: Not much you can do about it. It’s not great, but it is, what it is.
Composition. I think it needs more room on the right.
There are no details in the black plumage of the body. Looks like Topaz DeNoise did you in on the details.
Here’s a quick sample of just bringing the shadows back more toward black, darkening the background a little and bringing up whites in the bird just a bit.
There is a lot of blue color fringing on the branches in the background. Don’t know what may have accenuated that.
Very nice. Thanks for the suggestions. Appreciate it. It is a challenging capture for me, but worth playing with for the nifty subject’s pose. I have ton of static shots of this guy but not very many BIFs of him. I couldn’t not try to massage this pose. So, what would you suggest on improving this shot of him a couple of frames later with its… different busy background? Thanks in advance for any help.
Pretty neat to get a pileated in flight. Of the two, I’d go with the second.
