Battling Birds

Battling Birds

A Little Background

Sitting in my backyard, decided I wanted to photograph birds at my feeder.

Approach

TIP:  More often than not, you won't nail the shot on the first try.  You'll likely take shots, make adjustments, and try again.  I'm sure any professional would even agree with this.

Initial Scene

Here's the scene via the naked eye.

Fun to watch.  Birds are great at a feeder.  If you look closely, you'll see a bird on the left side of the feeder about half way up.  However, fun to watch, not so hot of a photograph.

• Too wide of a shot, too cluttered and busy to focus on anything.
• Harsh light at mid-day.
• Horrible colors.  Spring will be better, but not Spring yet. :-)

The Plan

• Come back first thing in the morning for MUCH better, diffused light.
• Isolate one feeding station to better focus on a bird.
• Blur out the backdrop to remove clutter and make a bird pop even more.
• Lower F-Stop
• Zoom in 
• TIP: Try scenes in other cameras, like portrait or action, in lieu of the F-Stop.
• MAY go black and white to eliminate the horrible colors.

A Little Better

I moved my favorite feeding station to isolate it better, and leave room to catch a bird flying in.  After some experimenting, I went with f5.6 and around 150mm zoom to blur out the background.

This first shot of a Cat Bird is definitely better.  I do like the eye contact which always makes for a more interesting photo.  Photo needs some finishing touches, but not quite the photo I want today.  I'll put some key words on it to help me find it later.

Patience and a Little Luck Pays Off

Sometimes you just have to be patient, and get a little lucky.  A Cardinal was at the station, and a Cat Bird decided it was his turn. :-)

Post-Processing

The photo needs some touch up, in my opinion.  The following lists my post-processing steps for the final photo at the beginning of the article.  I use Lightroom, Photoshop, and Nik, but most other photo editors offer some, if not all, of the features I used.

• Crop the photo to remove some dead space.
• Bumped up the Exposure a little for brightness.
• Boost the Clarity to add crispness.
• Boost the Saturation and Vibrance to add color pop.
• NOTE: I rarely add Saturation, just Vibrance, but Saturation did help, to me.
• Reduced Noise.
• Increased Sharpness.
• Finally, added a slight vignette to help highlight the birds.

I use Lightroom, Photoshop, and Nik, but most other photo editors offer some, if not all, of the features I used. 

Definitely more I would do for a final photo, such as:

• Remove the feeder pieces in the lower left.
• Remove the red flower blurs in the background (but maybe not)
• De-saturate the green in the backdrop, or even make it gray

but this is enough for now.

What Do You Think?

• So what do you think of the photo and my process?  Once you get used to it, this all happens very quickly, well except for maybe the patience part.  LOL
• What would you do different?  Hey, I'm still learning too.
• Questions?  Leave a comment.
• Feel free to post photos and comments applicable to this article.

Related Tutorials

You can always search the web for related tutorials using Google, Bing, Yahoo or you favorite search tool, but here's a couple of relevant tutorials that include depth-of-field:

Aperture and F-Stops
Composition - How to Compose a Photo

Thanks to Mike Browne (@mike_browne) at PhotographyCourses.biz for offering, in my opinion, some of the best training videos on the web, and they are FREE. :-)

Settings

These aren't written in stone, experiment.

• Canon EOS 7D
• Canon EF-S 55-250mm (f/4-f/5.6 lens)
• f/5.6
• 1/640 sec
• ISO 800
• 154mm
• RAW

My Web Sites

http://brettossman.com (photos for sale)
http://500px.com/brettossman (additional photos)

Follow Me

Twitter: @LBrettOssman
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How Sharp Do Your Photos REALLY Need to Be?

Tack Sharp, Tack Sharp, Tack Sharp !!!

Everyone tells you your photos should always be tack sharp at 100% (1:1).  

But is tack sharp really necessary?

My answer is: depends.

NOTE: I'm not proposing sloppiness or bad technique, just sometimes getting tack sharp photos may prove difficult.  That can be OK.


Your photo needs to be as sharp as it needs to be, and that depends on your plans for it.  Most people aren't going to zoom your photo to 100% (1:1) or zoom at all.

Viewing Photos Electronically or Sharing in Social Media

Tack sharpness is likely the least concern in these cases.  Does the photos look sharp on your monitor?  Good enough, in my humble opinion.  One caveat: photos of items you are selling online.  Potential buyers may zoom those photos, so zoom before you post, making sure the zoom looks sharp.

Printing

Most will insist tack sharpness at 100% (1:1) for printing photos.  Again, not necessarily.  Re-size a COPY of the photo to the intended print size, and view the photo at that size on your monitor.  Don't fill the monitor.  If you plan to print a 5x7 inch photo, view it at 5x7 on your monitor.  If it looks sharp, try a test print.  Look good, great. 

Selling Photos / Entering Contests

ALWAYS strive for tack sharpness at 100% (1:1) in these cases.  If selling, people assume you are professional.  Contest judges are very detailed and, yes I'll say it, picky.  Rightfully so in both cases.

Non-tack sharp photos sales or refunds.  Not only that, you risk a bad reputation as a professional photographer. Judges, among other criteria, WILL zoom your photo to 100% (1:1), maybe more.

In these cases, learn all the techniques for getting tack sharp photos and use them: top notch lenses, tripods, camera hand-holding, focusing techniques, etc.

Achieving Tack-Sharp Photos

Here's one link on getting tack sharp photos: PhotographyCourses.biz Technical Videos. Just open the site and check off Image Sharpness.  Oh, Mike offers NUMEROUS other free videos as well as excellent paid courses, but start with the free ones.

As usual, if you have any questions, comment on this blog or email me at Brett@BrettOssman.com.

COOL Way to View Your Photos !!!

You Take Great Photos and You Want to Enjoy Them

I like viewing my photos.  I have an electronic picture frame, but frankly, I forget to turn it on and it just takes up space on my desk.  I looked into options for displaying photos on my PC.  Obviously, I can set up a screen saver to play a slide show, but I probably won't watch a screen saver.

I discovered a way to set up a slide show on my desktop display !!!

Here's a screen shot of my desktop:

My desktop changes the photo every 10 minutes.

How did I do this?

Set Up the Windows Desktop

Now, these are Windows 10 instructions, but I understand earlier Windows versions, back to Windows 7 I believe, have the same type of features.  I suspect Mac computers can do the same.

Create a folder for your desktop photos.  My folder happens to be F:\Laptop Monitor\Laptop.  Next step is to set up the Windows desktop to display a slide show.

Right click on your desktop, and click Personalize:

• Select Themes
• Select Theme Settings
• Select Desktop Background

 

• Set up your desktop as you wish. At minimum, set:  
• Background to Slideshow
• Album to the folder you created above
• Change Picture Every: how often you want photos to change
• I recommend Choose to Fit set to Center.

 Here's my settings.

 

Prepare Desktop Photos

OK, now prepare and store your photos for your desktop display. 

Don't overwrite the original photo.  Save a copy to your desktop photo folder.  You may want the original for another purpose later, like printing.

Re-size and save photos for your desktop display. 

Re-sizing isn't absolutely necessary, but I didn't want my icons on top of my photos, nor did I want Windows sizing them for me. 

As most of you will use a variety of photo editing software, I won't get into details for re-sizing.  Re-sizing, when available tends to be VERY simple, so check your photo editor.  BUT, if you need some help learning how, let me know which software by name.

For my 1440x900 laptop display, I found re-sizing to 1296x810 pixels worked great.  Experiment with re-sizing for your monitor, display and layout.  

HINT: Set up some sort of preset or automated action you can easily apply to future photos you want to include.  For example, in Lightroom, set up a Preset, or Photoshop an Action, to re-size and save future photos.

Save the re-sized files to your desktop folder. Save as a JPG/JPEG file.  IF you can set quality, try 6-8 out of 10 or mid-range.  If quality isn't an option, don't worry about it, just save JPG. :-)

Manage Slideshow Folders

Want to change the photos displayed?  Simply re-size and save new ones, or delete one from the desktop folder.  No need to mess with the desktop settings anymore.

Any questions or help I can offer, let me know.