Mr Cardinal

[Judyt]

ok lets try this again!
This is one of my favourites....I'd love your comments!

[JPS]

Hi,
certainly a pretty little bird.
Would you consider cropping to make the bird less central and larger in the frame?
Whatever you decide, he's (or She) is still very pretty.
Thanks for sharing.

[TheArcane]

Cardinals are very beautiful birds, and it's always wonderful when you can get shots of them. As a couple of suggestions for the future, try to not center your main subject in your photograph. Another thing is try using a larger aperture opening in order to blur the background, and draw more attention to your subject.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Judy,

Welcome to the CIC forums from me.

I see you shot this with a Nikon P510 (I have one too) at an equivalent focal length of 750mm at 1/60 second, f/5.1 and iso 800.

Despite the IS being unbelievably good on these cameras, I find subject movement with a bird is still a significant cause of many of my spoiled shots. I find they need to be in the sunlight, so I can work at 400 iso and a shutter speed of > 1/500s to get a good 'keeper' rate.

Given the small sensor, you are stuck with a fairly significant DoF, especially seeing how close the background is here - if you can shoot against a more distant background, the extra DoF works to your advantage over a DSLR though.

I would definitely crop off the right hand side; just losing the wire 'tie', but retaining the tail.

Another thing that will help with image quality is not to post this quite so big; I would downsize to say 800px tall (and whatever the width comes out at after the crop), then sharpen with USM at 60%, 0.4px radius and 3 threshold, all before uploading. You might consider applying the sharpening just to the bird, not the fence or trees, if you skills with layers and PP software are 'up for it'
This will help with noise and sharpness, although the latter isn't too bad anyway.

I haven't posted one of mine yet I am still coming to terms with jpg shooting (after 3 years of RAW only) and in consequence, losing all the feather detail

UPDATE: I took the plunge, rather than hijack your thread, you can find my effort here; Ring-necked Parakeet shot with P510

Cheers,

[bhurley]

I like the complementary colours here -- red cardinal, green cedar. And I love his cocked head, checking out something on the ground. I spent a few years banding birds (that's "ringing" to our UK members here), and whenever we caught a cardinal we had to be very careful when extracting it from the mist net. They are very aggressive and that beak can really do damage: it's designed to crack nuts and seeds, but it does a very good job on fingers, too.