Bullfinch at pool + re - post

Bullfinch
Lovely birds, and when they come to drink it is nearly always in pairs or often with their young. They are frequent drinkers too.
Quite a large crop. Another case of shadow chopping Uurrgh !
D200 Sigma 100-300
Usual set up.
Cheers
JohnR

Very nice, great pose
Rene de Heer

Thanks Rene.
Looking at it again now it looks a tad light. See what folks think.
Maybe my monitor hadn't warmed up !!

I haven't seen a bullfinch in a long time John, a really nice bird to have in your vast collection, so thanks for that. However, I don't think the large crop has done the image any justice as it looks quite grainy on my screen and the bird itself is a little soft. I do agree with your last comment about it being a bit too tight in the frame... What ISO did you use..?

Brett

I like it John.
Robert

Hi John

As Rene says 'cracking pose' and I agree with you that you have cropped a little tight but still a very nice image!

David

I like the over the shoulder look. I think it might be a little light too, judging by the local ones. Maybe a minor adjustment would also take care of the background noise? I don't know about your setup, but with mine, I find noise most obvious if I try to brighten a dark background.

Excellent shot. I really like the pose.



Paul

Thanks all.
Its off a horizintal so I,ll have to put a bit in on the bottom.!
Brett- its at 800 ISO
I,ll have a play and re post later.
Cheers
JohnR

How's this ?
less tight, darkened(gamma down ) and neat image.
Cheers
JohnR

Oh yes, much better. I still see a little noise just above his head, but wouldn't have noticed had I not been nit picking! Actually, on further comparison, the transformation is remarkable.

Definately the repost John!

David

Love the repost - much more punch.


Simon

The repost is far superior John
Major.

Excellent work John, the repost is sooo much better, well done for taking the time...

Brett

Thanks evryone.
JR

Repost is much better, I think it is also a touch over-sharpened - there are artefacts appearing in the feather contrast on the grey back, similar to moire patterning but too linear for true moire artefacts

Mike

Repost looks much better, beautiful bird....

Nice work.
Tony

Thanks
Mike
I had to blow the picture up to see the artefacts you mention on the birds back. I only give one degree of sharpening when I downsize for the site so you could probably find the same thing on any of my shots.. If you blow any of my stuff up to more than 1 to 1! you will see all sorts of rubbish which is due to heavy jpeg compression. I do this as I am not on broadband but also I just got into a system I suppose.. !
Thanks for pointing it out anyway.
Cheers
John

Just to amplify on my earlier comment....

True moire artefacts are a zig zag pattern where the sensor gives up trying to cope or the anti-alias filter is too weak, what I can see is what I term sharpening 'crunchiness', black blocking-up resulting from the ramp up/increase in edge contrast when you apply a sharpening pass. Using several passes of a low sharpening rate and radius size helps reduce this.

Low contrast very fine feather detail can often suffer this blocking-up of the blacks as the detail gaps are very small and edge contrast is very low - something along the lines of.......

Unsharpened feather detail;

--..--
--..--
--..--

where "--" is feather edge and "." is the pixel gap to next feather edge

On sharpening the sharpenig pass extends the feather edge contrast to black or near black giving sometthing like;

--I..I--
--I..I--
--I..I--

or if sharpening radius is > than the feather detail edge gap, the detail smears out to;

--IIII--
--IIII--
--IIII--

and hence a black artefact streak appears


Mike

.............................err, what Mike said...................me, I just can't resist Bullfinch images, stunning shot John, a stonker of a bird!!

Colin