Red-Headed Woodpecker

[ScubaDude]

I've been hunting a pair of woodpeckers who've nested in a tree down the street. Due to their nest being quite high off the ground, I either have to shoot straight up at them or move the camera back quite a ways and shoot with my 400mm and 1.4x extender (losing auto-focus) and crop extensively. This was shot early in the morning, so my ISO was at 800. Both the darkest blacks and brightest whites got slightly clipped; I think next time I'll expose more for the highlights... the clipped highlights seem more distracting than the clipped blacks. Also, I think I'll lower the ISO (I wanted a fast shutter speed to get some BIF shots as the birds left the nest, but the shutter lag on my T1i always put the birds half out of the frame). I've found another spot to shoot from that puts the sky in the background (I think the background tree is a bit distracting). Anyways, I thought the pose was good. C&C welcome.


Red-Headed Woodpecker by ScubaDude1960, on Flickr

 

[greybeard]

Nice shot...............I played around with cropping it...............I like the texture of the tree but, I just want to see more of the bird.

woodpecker

 

[ScubaDude]

Thanx for the feedback, greybeard. For the web, the close crop works. Since I plan on printing it, I didn't want to crop it too much, and my version had already cropped out ~70% of the original shot.