This was shot 4 years ago in the southern mountains of Costa Rica. This has to be my all time favorite bird with approx 2 ft long tail which undulates in the wind as it flies.
just feedback
Canon 1DxII 300 mm lens at f5.6 and 1/80th sec, ISO 500, and processed with Topaz sharpening and noise reduction. Lighting was backlit and spotty thru branches and tricky.
These birds are not only difficult to find but very difficult to isolate. This is a fairly typical jungle canopy setting for a Quetzel. I think you could cut the saturation a bit. Otherwise a fine image to get the whole bird including the tail.
It must have been very tricky to capture this so completely - I like the jagged wing feathers on both sides and the focus is very good. What a bird!
The quetzal is a magnificent bird to find and photograph. I’ve had the fortune to photograph them several times in Costa Rica a well. This environment is typical and to me works fine as it is where you’d expect to find them.
Looking at the larger version, some thing is really odd. The red plumage has minimal detail and has kind of a painterly look, while the green feathers next to it have a look of being over sharpened. I don’t know what the RAW file contained.
Very nice, Larry. I love these birds, though there were some others that I found just as beautiful. When I processed my shots, the noise reduction software really mashed up the plumage on automatic settings (I tried a couple of different software packages) and I had to go in and do a lot of tweaking on the sliders to get anything that I felt was acceptable. I don’t think you need to reduce saturation. The colors on these birds are just fully saturated and that’s all there is to it.
