Woodpecker/Blue Jay

[dannylightning]

saw some birds out in the yard this morning and got a few shots before they flew away

not the greatest image quality but there alright I guess.

 

[waday]

Nice shots. I have both of those birds in my backyard.

The shots could use a bit of PP, IMO.

 

[tirediron]

Agree ^^ I think a stop or so of exposure boost and maybe push the white point a bit. Great scenes, just need a little tweaking.

 

[dannylightning]

Yeah, they do need to be brightened up a bit, I usually leave them on the dark side when I make the into a jpeg, the program I use to view my Jpeg photos can do some editing, you can easily brighten a photo with that but you cant make it darker with out screwing it up. I forgot to brighten them up before I posted them.

 

[baturn]

That's an interesting shot of the acrobatic Blue Jay. Nice.

 

[dannylightning]

Thanks, here are the fixed up versions and 2 more of the crazy blue jay that I did not really like.

 

[Hunter58]

Hi Danny,

The lightened up versions are nicer and I'm with you the middle Jay shot is the keeper of the 3. I like the composition on the Jay but for the Red-bellied I would try a different crop, you should try it with more in front of the bird than behind giving the appearance of looking into the frame not out of it. Since you said it was OK to edit I thought I would show you what I mean. Here it is recropped to put more in front of the bird, I ended up cropping out your watermark in the process (not intentional, just ended up that way), then I made two small adjustments. There was little branch above the shoulder in the background I found distraction so I cloned it out and then I did a slight sharpening on the image.

 

[dannylightning]

Thanks, Usually I try and center the shot so I have room to crop in either direction, in this photo I did not do that and If I cropped it to get him in hte frame where I wanted I was getting more gain that I would like to have so I chose to leave more room behind him than in front of him.

I did some sharpening and than some noise reduction on these to get rid of some grain, it made them a little less sharp but to me it was a good compromise to get the less grain and a decently sharp photo

the original was really under exposed and it took a bit to get it to look descent. I got a few more of that bird that I need to fix up, all under exposed and the bird was roughly in the same position for each shot. Ill go thew and play with those some time to day and see if I can get one to look better.