I had been photographing flowers and insects when I noticed this gold finch feeding on a large sunflower. I was about 25 feet away and only had the 85mm F-2 macro lens on my R7, took several shots anyway. Was a bit surprised at the quality of the image.
Specific Feedback Requested
Sharpness, color and composition. Should I have cropped out the green at the bottom? I did not as I thought I was pushing the quality of the image as it is.
Technical Details
Canon R7, RF 85mm F-2 macro lens.
1/640 @ F-7.1 ISO 100
Hand held.
1 Like
I think the IQ is good. But that leaf does feel like it shouldn’t be there, for me. I think it could actually be cloned out, with enough info from the OOF branches in the BG to fill in. I’d hate to lose the bottom dry petals on the sunflower head by cropping from the bottom. I’d also remove the small leaf tip in the LL and maybe crop from the right to remove the OOF bud – after harvesting any possible clone source material from the OOF leaves on the right.
Pretty amazing image quality for the lens and distance, John. If you have it, you might try upsizing the image using Topaz’s AI Gigapixel or one of the other good enlarging tools before cropping. I don’t know if it would work, but I know David Schoen did something like that a couple of times when he had a very large crop. I agree with Diane about not cropping any tighter. You might want to go back to the uncropped version to do your cloning as it would give you a lot more material to draw on. I often do that when I know I’m going to have to do a fair amount of cleanup.
Hi John, the image quality has held up well with the large crop. I like the position of the goldfinch on top of the sunflower and capturing the feeding behavior. Agree with others that cropping further may not be a good idea. I wish there was a catchlight in the eye.
