Northbound bird images

[MARINERMAGNUM]

I saw alot of nice name brand birds this morning. I was lucky enough to capture images of Fox sparrows,Warblers,Eastern phoebe,Hermit thrush,Kinglets.

These are a few i thought i'd post while i'm looking thru the other 75 images. It is unbelievable how much better these look in RAW form as opposed to JPEG after you convert them,especially the kinglet image. He was 10 feet away and i got him at 300mm,Looks awesome RAW!

Criticism and abuse welcome!

Canon Rebel XT 70-300 lens iso 200 F 5.6>all

300mm,640

250mm,1600

300mm,800

[Steve Foss]

Hey MM:

Really nice! Looks like you had a rewarding day out there.

I like the thrush the best. That's a sweet composition, and the reds and blues really set it off.

The kinglet comp is excellent, too, but the sharpest point of focus on the bird appears to be the wing feathers. At close distances with telephoto, depth of field can be razor thin, and I think that's why the bird's eye/head is a bit OOF.

[MARINERMAGNUM]

Thanks. You're right about the kinglet's head/oof,but in the RAW image,the head/eye looks sharp. Would it look sharp printed?

[Steve Foss]

If the wings look sharper on a computer monitor than the head/eye, the same relationship will exist in a print. You can, however, selectively sharpen by lassoing the eye and sharpening it. I use that technique pretty often with good success. In fact, I'd sharpen the whole image just slightly and then lasso the eye and sharpen it until it's almost blown out but not quite, and see how that looks to you. If you sharpen the whole image too much, the patterns on the wings and tail will really go nuts.

[Dbl]

I agree on #2 comp looks nice.

[Jim Almquist]

MM they all look nice but I like 3 the best.Wish is would warm up some so we could get the migration moving a little faster.Pretty soon you should start seeing hummers by the looks of the map.

[MARINERMAGNUM]

Thanks. I took Steve's advise and tweaked them a little more. I hope not too much!