Anna's Iridescence

Hi Catherine,

 

The hummingbird is fairly sharp and positioned well in the frame.  The BG is a little busy with those bright patches and you might want to tone those down a little bit.  I like the hummingbird which steals the show in the scene.....................................Jim

Hi Catherine:

A beautiful little Anna's with some very nice light.  The moment must have been very special.  

I wish the hummer was a bit sharper.  Even at a 50% crop, I would expect more details in the plumage.

Looks like the perch (behind the hummer) was bright and there was an attempt at darkening it?  Has some odd artifacts.  Overall saturation is a touch high for my tastes.

 

Wish I had this hummer here, beautiful iridescent colors this one.

Perhaps another round of selective web sharpening, nice catch Catherine

Thank you for the comments. I will try a little more sharpening. Did not change saturation settings at all, but I will review my processing steps to see whether software slipped in some "auto" saturation.

Nice catch, Catherine.  The colors are really showing well.  The Anna's looks a bit soft in the larger image.  I'm not sure what's going on there, but it looks as if the autofocus might have caught the end of hte perch rather than the bird.

<div> <div> <div>Hi Catherine.  I tried to respond to your private email, but it bounced.  Do you have your latest email in NPN?</div> <div> </div> <div>It was mostly the larger post I was looking at.  I have heard that there's an issue with the new system if you just post the larger image and let NPN do the downsizing for the 720 pixel image.
 </div> I just looked up the focal ranges on DOF Master-I used 610mm for the lens to give your shot the benefit of the doubt.  At f/8 it lists the DOF as .48 inches on either side of the plane of focus at 15 ft from the subject (just a guess based on shooting hummers myself).  When you get close with these big lens combinations the DOF goes way down.  That's why you rarely see a songbird entirely in focus and why the bird photographers stress focusing on the eye as the critical focus area.  That's often difficult, so the cheek or side sometimes has to do.  I'll use group autofocus on bird-in-flight shots sometimes, particularly against the sky because it picks them up easier, but for perched birds I use the smallest autofocus area the camera can produce.
 </div> Hope this helps
 </div>

A beautiful portrait of this handsome beauty Catherine, but you already know how much I like it.

Sweet One

Thank you, Dennis! So very helpful!! 

I posted a 720 directly. Then tried to post a resized image for the "larger" photo. So, the "truer" shot to view is the 720.