Peace and Joy

Now this is a Christmas card shot! Fantastic composition and colors. This is a nuthatch isn't it? Just beautiful, Mary Fran! Cheers! Chris

Yes it's a nuthatch! I have over 150 shots of them around this wreath and so tough to get them sharp.

Well, it is gonna be a winner! It really is a beautiful photograph. You know, you really should think about putting together a little line of 'Mary Fran' greeting cards. You could just make a killing hawking (no pun intended) these to the turistas coming up for the fall colors, etc. You know, looking at this image some more, you might consider just a touch more crop to the left side, maybe up to about those brighter more indistinct leaves, just my opinion...Cheers! Christopher

To all the "birders", may your holidays be filled with cooperative

birds, perfect focus and light, and "one of a kind" compositions.

(We're never to old to dream.) Have a wonderful holiday season.

 

PS Joe Baker, thanks for the creative inspiration. My hat is off to

you, I completely understand the sharp focus challenge you face.

Ho, Ho, Ho.

To you and yours Mary Fran! And a big thank you to you for your inspiration and help! I hope to one day be able to take such beautiful images such as this. You have so much patience and it shows in your iamges. Now over the holidays perhaps you can get a good shot of one of those elusive elves! HO HO HO!!

Thanks, Chris, William, and Jan. You're more than welcome Jan, but you ARE getting some super shots and the way I see it the more good pictures "the merrier"!

originality 7+; Mary i,am humbaled and honored. you are a great artist in your own right. Have a very merry Christmass to you and your family.

sincerly Joe B.

It's a lovely shot, and the bird's concentration, gives it the feeling of imminent flight. It's purely subjective, but I like a tighter crop, taking the bird out of the center, and giving it a bit more prominence. You mentione in this and other shots, that you thought they should be sharper. It's very rare to get a digital image that doesn't require sharpening in the editor, but many bypass this simple procedure.Digital imaging, with the cameras most of us use, still doesn't match the quality of film, but can be rectified in the editor.

Attached, is a slight variation in cropping, and one click of sharpen, most noticable in the wings.

Thank you Doug, are you sharpening before or after resizing? I usually do one sharpening before resizing for upload, perhaps I should be resizing first? And yes, I agree with you and Chris on the crop, ran into trouble with my browser and couldn't upload so it went as is to make it in for the holiday. Thanks a bunch for the help!

Doug i agree with you in some cases, in others sharpening gives an unreal effect to the birds, takeing away from the softness of the feathers,the bird in the hand look at i like. just my humble oppion.

First, I agree with Joe that oversharpening changes the bird's natural image. The celia from the feathers invariably produces a soft image in nature that we try to sharpen out later.

 

Secondly, four of us where I work are camera buffs. We tested five different Canon digital cameras (2 megapixel resolution, 4, 6, 8, & 13) along with a Canon AE-1 film camera on a street sign that was 50 yard away. Same lens was used on the 6,8,13, and film camera. The film camera used Ektachrome. We then set the same image size in Photoshop CS2 (all images were large JPEG) and we blew up the film version to the same approximate size (13" x 19"). We printed the digital pictures on my Epson 2400. You could see pixalation in the 2 and 4 megapixel cameras. But beyond 4, none of us could tell the difference as 6, 8, 13, and film all looked the same. Maybe if we had continued to poster size, differences would have been seen.

 

The bottom line is digital cameras have equivalent resolution as film up to at least 13 x 19 in our limited experiment. I only occasionally sharpen (thank you, AF) as I don't like the distortion it can cause...and I shoot exclusively in RAW which has no post-processing software.

 

My suggestion: Sharpen your image only until YOU are happy. Then follow my motto SI FI HI: Sign It, Frame It, Hang It. And my guru is Monet...who painted, for gawd sake, out of focus, and they are masterpieces! (His cataracts were worse then mine.)

 

Merry Christmas everyone!

Thanks William, yes I've seen what happens when you over sharpen. I only do once. My experience says more than that and it gets distorted. The good news is these print much better than they upload to photo.net and frequently no sharpening for print purposes.

The hard part is I end up with the original, the photo.net copy and yet another copy for the printer. Lots of storage consumed.

 

Can you imagine, it's 40 degrees and raining! No snow yet this year! And please don't tell me how warm it is there--let me bask in these temps feeling blessed! Saw a very tall rectangular box under the tree :)

 

No cheery weather out here! 55 degrees and thinking about raining...it's due Christmas night. Wait til you start saving RAW files, then the XMP file that goes with it when you process it, plus the large JPEG duplicate. 15-18MB per photo and that is not counting all the PSD and JPEG variations to post on PN. I have a couple of "old" external hard drives from Iomega (Peerless 20GB each), plus my computer has two 400GB drives configured to back up each other. Then once per year I copy all the new files onto a CD. During the year I cull out the unsavable rejects and reduce everything by 50% easily.

 

I'll be listening for that scream when you open your presents!