Cedar Waxwing

Steve,

Come down by me and you can get as close to these birds as you want! The head looks a touch soft but it's very good for the amount of cropping.

Love the fluff and eye contact Steve. I still need one of these myself.

Sweet image, Steve. I think I can see just a touch of detail loss from the crop, but 3.1 MP is still plenty for the web. The fluffed out state of the bird adds a lot of texture to an otherwise very smooth plumage. Nice job on the branch removal. I've taken an oath to skip an upgrade cycle in PS, but that does look like a tempting feature.

Steve, beautiful colors, good background and composition. He's a little soft but not disturbingly so. Nice job. And great job with the CA fill. I don't see it.

How high can you bump the ISO on the 7D without getting noise?

Steve, every time you post, I think back to the two trips I made to Mississauga to do technical training for SGI. I always enjoyed going to Canada to teach. Good memories...

Cheers,

Carol

Steve, I like the erect crest and clean background but I do think the large crop has had its effect on IQ.

Steve,

I like the pose, the raised crest and the natural colors. I think you have suffered some loss of detail from the large crop, this doesn't have as much detail as most of your images do. There does seem to be a touch of softness to the head, perhaps the bird was moving slighty.

Thank you everyone. I really appreciate your assessments. I wonder if the slight softness several of you commented on is due to the crop or to something else. No doubt, this is really pushing this large crop approach: the image is only 1563 pixels x 2022 pixels. However, from what I know at this point, my bet would be on the "something else". Dennis, I've just started exploring CS 5. The improvement in the "refine edge" tool along with the "content aware" patch and fill tools make the upgrade worthwhile for me. Carol, I've tried quantitatively evaluating noise but I'm not yet sure that I have a good answer to your question. Perceived noise depends on both frequency and magnitude of the noise, as well as whether it's just color or luminance or both. Also, noise depends on properties of the image, notably level of exposure, as well as on the iso set on the camera. I pretty well always apply NR and sharpening. What I often do is operate at ISO 500 and use NR as well as sharpening. If possible, I just apply NR to the background. For such selective NR I use Dfine 2.0. Sometimes, I decide to try NR for the whole image and use either Dfine 2.0 or Neat Image. Also, sometimes I adjust the ratio of color NR to luminance NR in different parts of the image. There is a good dose of subjectivity in all of this and I still have plenty to learn. Experience counts a lot and having all of you comment on these images provides a very valuable component of experience in the assessment.
P.S.: I'm glad that you have good memories of Mississauga, Carol. We find it a great place to live....although it's nice to go south for the winters!