Rufus Hummingbird

Charlie, Very image. I like the diagonal formed by the branch. I think this is best Rufus Hummer image I have seen. great job.

Harry

Thank you Harry. I forgot to mention in my original text that this was very noisy and I have done significant smoothing to surrounding background (not all so clean in places which I think will be obvious to many of you. There is still some noisy areas where I sharpened before noise reduction. Since taking this I have learned here on NPN to deal with noise a bit better than before.

First and foremost Charlie, this is one beautiful bird and I love the pose and the diagonal line of the perch :^)

A few things I would like to mention though:

Certain areas of the perch appear very "hot" in contrast with other parts that seem well exposed.

For me, the subject is a little "tight" in the frame and, working with the assumption that you cropped this image, I think perhaps more space around it would work a lot better, especially in a landscape/horizontal format with more space on the left for the subject to look into.

Although it's not as noticeable in the smaller version, soon as the larger version came up my eyes locked onto all those areas that show rough artifacts (not sure if this is the correct term) around practically everything that outlines the bird and the perch. My guess is this has something to do with work you may have done on this image in PP, but it may also have something to do with the file compression, something other members have been endeavouring to teach me about recently ;^)

Hopefully others will be able to explain this better to you than I can.

Nice light and pose, Charlie. The detail looks good,but I think I'm seeing some processing artifact in the larger image. There's some blotching around the bird and perch.

Seems we must have posted at the same time Charlie ;^)

As I've learned with my own PP work, one of the main keys to successful smoothing out of grain in the background is to greatly increase the size of the image in PS and use a relatively small brush size with the selection tool, so that my selection comes a lot closer to the edges. Doing this will go a long way toward avoiding those troubling areas you have in this image. Of course this calls for a greater investment of time, however, I'll only do this with images I really feel will be worth showing to anyone once the work is done.

By the sounds of it though, these are all things you're already well in the process of leaning for yourself :^)

great subject, beautiful colors and background, and a nice pose. Nits mentioned by Ashley.

Hello Charlie, wonderful subject indeed. I completely copy Ashley in all her intervention, but as you already told, this was the beginning of your PP story.

Cheers, Luca

Charlie,
beautiful bird, great pose and colors.

Thanks everyone for comments and suggestions on this. I always liked this shot but it was from a time that I would not move above ISO100, would not use a tripod, Used noise reduction in extremely small amounts if at all.

NPN has brought me a long way and has shown me that I have a lot of enjoyment coming further along.