Little Rockie

Here’s a picture I am not really sure about. The bird is a rock wren that I found on a recent trip out to west Texas. One of the things that bothers me about it is that I can’t see the whole tail but such is life. This little guy was staying down and out of site until I started making my imitation of bird sounds at which point he popped up to have a look at who was hanging around his rock. He only popped up for a second and luckily I was able to lock focus and grab a shot.

Anyhow, the first shot I am posting is the picture exactly as it came out of the camera only scaled down. The first thing I did was to go into Photoshop and remove the growth that is in the bird’s eye. I don’t know what it was but it didn’t look very attractive. A little work with the rubber stamp tool and it looked pretty good to me. I then played around with the cropping a bit in an attempt to get the bird a bit further from the center of the frame. As you can see I didn’t exactly have a lot of room to play with. With the landscape crop I had to remove more of the rock than I was totally happy with and the portrait crop seemed a bit cramped to me. After spending a while on the cropping I adjusted the contrast and saturation a bit and applied some USM to produce the second and third pictures.

The technical data are as follows:

Camera: Canon EOS 20D
Lens: EF 500mm f/4.5L USM
Aperture: f/8, shutter speed: 1/1000 sec, ISO 200

I used f/8 because when you are this close the DOF is pretty tiny for a 500mm lens (pretty much at the minimum focusing distance). I bumped up the ISO from 100 to 200 because I was using the lens hand-held and the faster shutter speed helps a lot to achieve sharp pictures, especially when the lens lacks IS. Trying to get this shot from a tripod proved to be exceedingly difficult because the bird was terribly uncooperative and did not seem to like to be in the open for longer than two or three seconds.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing what the good folks here think.

Thanks,

Greg

Good job with the eye. Looks very good.

I like the 2nd crop (landscape) here. You're right the portrait is a bit too tight. What's the background? Just a wall?

You've also done well with colour correcting your image to get the natural tones out. I'm not much of a bird man, and I don't know what kinda bird this is, etc.

The only thing, I wish there was some sorta background different than this beige wall, maybe some out of focus trees and leaves, etc. Also, I don't mind the tail not being there, it's behind the rock so it ain't as bad as if it were cropped of or something to that effect. What's the red thing on the rocks to the right? A flower? or a worm?
Good work.

Very good shot. I prefer the last, vertical crop. It is a bit tight but the bird is sharp enough and very well exposed that I appreciate seeing it as close up as possible. The bg color I don't mind, and allows the subject to stand out strong. good job editing as well.

The vertical crop also gets my vote. Nice work.
John

Leels, this picture was taken on the side of a mountain and the background is actually grassland/prairie leading along the side of the Rio Grande.

I tend to agree with you about the background being a bit too plain but I am not really sure what can be done about it at this point. Even with the lens stopped down to f/8 the background is completely out of focus even though there was a beautiful scene back there in the distance.

I am not sure what the red thing is. I didn’t notice it while I was taking the picture but I have a suspicion that it was something that the bird might have been eating. It looks like some sort of smashed up berry or something. Maybe I should try to clone it out as to me it is a bit distracting much like the growth on the bird’s eye.

Thanks for your input.

Greg

Gary and John,

I am leaning toward the vertical crop at this point also. At first the "tightness" bothered me but as I am living with it a bit it is growing on me. The other thing is that little red thing next to the bird bothers me more and more the longer I look at the picture.

Thanks all!

Greg

The portrait format gets my vote , the post process has also done justice to this already well taken pic imo ... The ability to bring out details of this fellow's eye has certainly added life to this image ... Well done !!