Patient bird

[acsky]

Hi all

Usually small birds fly away from me as soon as they see me holding my camera, but this one was patient enough and waited for me to take 4 shot of him.

Please give me some feedback on technique and composition. I know the background is a mess, maybe I should clone out the branches behind the head, but this is just a practice shot.

Toño

[FrankMi]

Toño, it looks to me like you got really good colouring in the bird, particularly in the breast. The tail is a bit dark but looking up against a bright sky, that is to be expected. The shooting angle doesn't display any of the colouring or patterns on the side of the bird and just looking up at it from here makes me think that the top of my head is at risk!

Yes, the branches behind the head could be cloned out and that might just be a good practice exercise. The back branches can be toned down with reduced contrast so that they don't detract from the subject but the three out-of-focus branches in the foreground and more noticeable and would be much more difficult to eliminate.

The image might be sharp enough to crop down to just the front half of the bird where most of the useable detail is.

[acsky]

Thanks for your comments Frank.

Indeed the bird was sitting almost on the top of the tree and I was holding the camera with a 70-80 degrees angle. So no chance to see any of the side colors.

But in this case the subject was not as colorful as your last Mandarin, so I didn't miss too much

[acsky]

Well, I gave it a try to clean up the background.

Also changed the ratio from 3:2 to 5:4 to make the branch on the front less prominent.

[jeeperman]

It is a good image to give you plenty of practice. While I will remove a twig or two this is pretty drastic. I used the clone tool to remove everything. I then gave a go with the dodge tool to lighten his underside. To give the sky a little more color I adjusted the hue in colors and gave it a bump of fill light. A very light sharpen to finish it off as there was already a slight halo and I tried not to make it worse. I hope this gives you some ideas. Oh I then slightly cropped it as some of the space was un-used.

[FrankMi]

Well, I gave it a try to clean up the background.

Also changed the ratio from 3:2 to 5:4 to make the branch on the front less prominent.

Yes, Toño. Looks better already and provides the 'practice' benefit as well.

[acsky]

Wow Paul, you left almost nothing for the little guy to hang on to. Thanks for your suggestion and mainly for the tip of dodging the underside. Your version of the sky looks good to me.