I’ll give these a rest after this one. I wanted to post one with the darker background and I really liked the pose of this bird as well as the perch. Unfortunately, I had just been shooting a Junco on the same perch and was zoomed in a bit close for this bird. By the time I zoomed out, it changed poses to something less to my liking. I had a very minimal clearance behind the tail, so I added canvas there and stole part of the perch from a Junco frame (scaling it to fit). There was an ugly piece of bark I use for a suet feeder immediately in front of the beak, so I painted over it and added some snow effects to more or less match the rest of the frame.
7DII, Sigma 150-600 C @ 335 mm, gimbal head mounted to blind, f/8, 1/250, iso 2000, manual exposure. Processed in LR & PS CC. Neat Image for noise reduction. Taken February 11th in a nice snow storm.
You may only download this image to demonstrate post-processing techniques.
Dennis, a truly wonderful photo here. The stance on the limb, the fleeting bit of snow, and of course the gorgeous color array of the bird all makes for a gorgeous image…
The light in this one is really the best of all three images. It has a wonderful glow. I like the pose. Good job on the processing. The belly is a little soft but it could be from feather movement. The eyes very interesting and I am wondering if I am seeing the reflection of your telephoto on the iris?
Dennis, I really like how this one posed for you. I’m guessing he was about to take flight. You did well to add canvas which is not at all obvious, and the framing does not look cramped to me. My only nit is that dark red just above its head is a little distracting. Otherwise it looks great to me.
Wonderful pose Dennis. Well caught. The 7D2 at ISO 2000?! Really nice image quality for that ISO. Well done. I’m afraid to go to ISO 1600 with my 7D2 and that’s for really low light. Terrific critical focus on the eye. Minor nit is the dark blob above the bird’s head - probably pretty easy to remove if you want.
It’s a great image, for sure. A subtle detail, but for me the frosting on the cake is your choice of shutter speeds to show a little motion in the snow. Too slow and the resulting long white streaks would distract. Fast enough to freeze the flakes, and they’d look like white nerts on an otherwise great photo. I’d be inclined to get rid of the red blob over its head too, since you’ve already applied the manipulation tools. Being red, it distracts from the head pretty strongly.
