Finally managed to get a decent shot of chickadees on a day when the sun bothered to come out. This was originally my second choice, but after some thought, decided it would make a more interesting challenge entry. Maybe I'll get kicked to the curb for not having a heavily saturated shot of a pretty bird, but oh well.
pp: RAW-TIFF conversion, minor cloning, brightness/contrast, saturation(?) desat, resize, usm, sharpen, save for web
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Place: 110 out of 138 Avg (all users): 5.2813 Avg (commenters): 6.0000 Avg (participants): 5.2174 Avg (non-participants): 5.3171 Views since voting: 761 Views during voting: 336 Votes: 192 Comments: 10 Favorites: 0
First of all, great shot, very disappointing you didn't get at least a 5.5. But when life gives you lemons... blah, blah, blah. The first thing I notice in the photo is the bird, kudos for that, and the slick, lustrous berries really are icing on the cake. The pin-drop white background and DOF in the branches really just takes me away. Congratulations on that, but I can tell you the first major flaw here is the flat lighting on your bird. The problem with this is that your bird is the subject and your shooting for a bird challenge. The chest of the Chickadee is almost flat gray, taking loads away from the overall impact of the photo. In addition to that, the bird is annoyingly grainy, a tad out of focus, and all the black ares of the head wash together, disallowing you from seeing the bird's eye. Your background looks great, it finishes the image off with a nice touch everyone looks for in an image. The big problem here is that your subject, the Chickadee, looks like you cut & pasted it in there form another photo. I'm guessing that's why you got such a low score on one of the best photos in this challenge. Fantastic composition and lighting, but the dynamics on the subject and the detail quality on the image in general is very poor, especially on the Chickadee. Sorry about your low score, but I was just looking through your portfolio, and the composition on those pictures is amazing! You've got a great eye, I'll be looking forward to seeing more of your work. Hopefully that helped you! if you have any questions just message me.
Nice bright in the eye, and good focus with all that distraction in the way..
I think a narrower DOF would have been nice, but probably wouldn't have been possible, and the bright sky hurts this - still we have to work with what we get right?
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