I got this shot from my deck of a hummer sentinel guarding a feeder perched on a cool pine tree formation. I’m endlessly fascinated by the interaction of the sun and their feathers. It is perched on a single pine needle! D500, Nikon 2-500 lens, 1/2500th, f/5.6, ISO 560, 500mm, cropped to 1207 x 1408, hand held, AI Clear
Whoa, this is very well exposed and I love the whole image design, Dave. I think the BG is super nice: a very good contrast with the texture of the subject.
PS. I am not sure why but when I click the image to view it large, there is something wrong with the image being displayed. Maybe @Dennis_Plank or @Sandy_Richards-Brown can help… if I click the image on the post above, and click it once again, is that viewing the image at 100% or some other resized version of the image?
Dave, this is really a fine image. Colours are excellent, sweet BG especially, and excellent detail - a bit soft in the largest version but hummers are often tough to get close to. The 2-500 seems a bit soft at 500, in my experience, (many lenses are) so try backing off to 480 or so.
Very interesting perch too.
A few suggestions to take it to the next level:
That little bit of weed is a distraction - easy to remove with “Content-Aware”
The whole image seems a bit bright. Try toning it down a hair, and perhaps more selectively to the bright perch - it competes a bit with the bird.
A touch more room on the left and less on the right. You don’t want the bird exactly centered, but it feels unbalanced as it. Sorry, also, I didn’t come thru to demonstarte my ideas on your squirrel - you were right, very hard to darken a BG with fur and hair involved.
Sandy
Adhika, There are occasional funky displays on NPN2, while the site is being continually upgraded and refined. Images can be very blurry for a short time. A click on a thumbnail will take the image to a larger size. Another click, larger still.
Dennis or David can surely answer your questions far better than I.
Sandy
Hi Adhika. Clicking the image resizes it for your screen, clicking the second time resizes it for the size at which it was uploaded. On the old system, I used to set different limits on my horizontal and vertical pixel count in my Lightroom Export script. With this feature, I just leave it at 1600 pixels for both, so people can blow it up to see finer details, should they wish to do so.
A nice image of the Anna’s, Dave. I like the perch and background. I do think a touch more room on the left would help the composition. The breast of the hummer looks “smeary” to me. I’ve seen that from a combination of noise reduction and sharpening gone awry. It would be interesting to see a jpeg output of the straight cropped raw image to see what the breast looks like there-it might help figure out what’s going on. I do suspect that it’s processing as the whole image has a slightly overprocessed look. AI clear can be tricky to use. One thing I noticed about it is that if I’m processing more than one image in succession and I pull up Topaz Studio in Photoshop, the previous action from the last image is automatically applied to the current image and I have to go over to the right side and delete it then have it redo whatever I want. I discovered it applying AI Clear three times at one point and the results remind me somewhat of this.
Bird, perch, light, and background are beautiful. Perch is unique. Looks to me like the image quality has suffered quite a bit from a big crop. Since this is in your backyard, you could probably get the same shot but with better IQ by getting closer.
This image is real nice but I’d like to see it with a little less saturation, especially in the blue sky.
