Ruffled Rufous

Hi all! This is one of my favourite images from my trip with my son (Josiah) to the Fraser Valley and SW Coast of BC this spring. He posted a close-up portrait last month of a male rufous hummingbird that perched in front of him on a feeder at the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Delta, BC...this is (I believe) a different male, and as you can see, he is some perturbed by the presence of a second male coming into his area. Maybe there's too much anthropomorphism going on in my mind, but to me, even without having witnessed the vigilant protest that ensued, you can just tell this is an angry little hummer. And I love that. I also really like how the moss/lichen on the branch he chose to perch on coordinates so nicely with his gorget display.

Of course what I love most is the memory of a very excited 8yr old budding nature photographer beside me as he desperately tried to swing his lens into position to capture the same scene (sadly unsuccessfully this time) along with all his exclamations of joy every time he did nail a shot. He's officially a hummingbird addict now.

For those of you who are interested in such things, this is only about 30% of the width of the original image from my D600, and I'm quite pleased with the fidelity that remained, even before reducing to 1200px. This has very minimal sharpening applied, and the highlight and "shadow" areas around the bird are there in the RAW file so I would interpret that to mean they are not sharpening halos...I backed off the sharpening significantly even at just 0.1px.

My biggest disappointment with this image comes from coming dangerously close to blowing the glare on the wet branch he had perched on. I did tweak my exposure during the few moments he was perched here but was concentrating entirely on him and the white throat patch and underbelly and missed the highly reflective glare on the branch.

I'll probably share another pic or two of this handsome little hummer on you later in the week, but for now I'm anxious to hear your thoughts and suggestions, with thanks for caring enough to do so.

If you have time, I think this guy deserves a click through to the larger version.

Nikon D600
Nikkor AF-S 200-400mm f/4G VR IF-ED @ 400mm
ISO 400
1/500sec @ f/5.6
monopod

Processing Notes:
Converted from RAW using Phase One Capture One Pro 7
Adjustments to tone and contrast using Nik Color Efex Pro 4 and Viveza 2 in PS5
Nik Dfine 4.0 just to smooth the background slightly (the noise was not at all offensive, but I tried it and liked the results)
Cropped to app. 30% of original width