Western Kingbird & Repost

I like the head turn in this Jim and the clean BG and complimentary color of the BG are nice. The eye and head looks sharp, but I am not seeing the feather detail I would expect in a shot like this. I am not sure if that is an issue with the lens at f/11? It actually has the soft feather look I would see if someone applied NR to the entire image (including the subject). Not sure if it is either of those. If the later, easy fix by re-processing the image without applying NR on the subject. 

Absolutely with you on the simplicity of this, Jim.  The strip of wire is all that is needed to present the bird perfectly against the pale ground.  There's a nice contrast between the tautness of the wire and the soft, slightly splayed feathers.

This actually looks pretty good for a D 800 E at iso-1000. I do vaguely remember  reading about some issues with softness due to moire problems over f9 with this camera so that may be a part of it. I know that my D 800 E is very noisy over iso-200 if I do any large crops so I tend to keep my iso-down below 200. As for the image itself, I like the composition and your background. On the large detailed view, the head plenty sharp to me and I only see the softness in the yellow body feathers but I don't find that a distraction.

Thanks Kurt, Ian, and David for your comments.  First, I want to say that prior to posting this image it was quite sharp on my computer.  It looked so sharp to me that I considered not sharpening it at all, but did give it a little bit of sharpening anyway.  As to any lack of sharpness that might have been the result of noise reduction to the entire picture, the answer is that I didn't do any noise reduction at all!  This was a very clean image.  I looked again at my settings for this image in ACR and saw that it had automatically applied a small amount of color noise reduction, but when I removed it there was no apparent difference. Kurt, shooting this at f11 is also not a factor.  This lens is very sharp at that f-stop.

David, moire is not the issue here.  I have had issues with moire in the past but not with this camera.  By the way David, I am able to get clean images with this camera routinely at ISO 1000, and depending on the scene, I have gotten good results as high as IS0 2500.  There have been a couple of photographers on NPN in the not too distant past that posted numerous images of excellent quality at IS0 3200, albeit while using flash, with D800 and D800E cameras.  You may be having more noise problems due to the environment you shoot in, which is commonly pretty dark.  Of course noise thrives in the darker areas of images.

I have re-examined this kingbird image pretty thoroughly, and I have concluded a couple of things.  I agree that the apparent sharpness even in my larger image is not too great, particularly below the bird's head.  I enlarged it a bit with the copy on my computer, and it looked much sharper.  At the size requirement on NPN the image, as posted, is too small to see it's sharpness.  The bird's feathers are fluffed up in such a way as to separate themselves into distinct sections, which may give the appearance of the smearing caused by overdoing the noise reduction feature.  And the yellow feathers do seem to lack detail, which I think is again partly a function of the small image size, but also due to a lack of contrast.

I have included a new (and hopefully better) version of this, which was re-processed again from the original raw file.  To this one I sharpened it a bit more, applied a small amount of luminance noise reduction to the background only, turned off the color noise reduction, and increased the contrast.  I also sized it to 1600 pixels instead of the original's 1200, hoping the larger size will better reveal the image's sharpness.

Thanks again folks for your helpful comments.  You are helping me to become a better photographer and post-processor.

Well, I just looked at the re-post, and the feather detail is still not showing on the lower half of the bird.  Still not big enough.  Oh well, I still learned a lot in the process and have the pleasure of knowing that in a slightly larger version this is a very sharp picture, where even the yellow feathers show up as being very distinct and detailed.

This is a very nice and simple image Jim with a flawless background. Great work!

Nice pose and background for this Kingbird, Jim. I do see the slight loss of detail in the body of the bird. This could be do to file compression. Overall a very nice image of this Kingbird.

Hi Jim,

I experienced similar problems with my cardinal image.  Raw file was take sharp and you could even make out the feather fibers clearly.  When I reduced the image for posting--the detail was lost and most attributed this to camera noise.  I think that this is one of those images that suffers when down-sized for posting. I see nothing wrong with the image  with that concept in mind. The full size tiff file is more than likely very awesome.  Repost has better detail..................................Jim

Great pose, Jim, and an excellent composition.  While I've seen better feather detail, after reading the other comments I suspect it's just due to the softness of the feathers and the way they're fluffed up.  Nicely done.


 

A classic shot of this flycatcher, Jim. The tight aperture may have been a side effect of another plan, but in this case it gave you a sharp shot across the depth of the bird.