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Inspiring and Supporting Photographers of Australian Birds

Splendid Fairy-wren

Photographed by

Darryl Lacey on Thu 9th May, 2019 and uploaded on same date.

Resolution

1400x973

Viewed

418

35168

Comment

200mm f14 1/320 ISO 400 Photoshop cropped, sharpened birds and intensity of yellows reduced

Equipment

Nikon D90; Nikon 18-200mm f3.5-5.6

Location

Victoria Dam, Carmel, Western Australia

Keywords

male, female, adult, non-breeding plumage/features

This image is not available for download.

Glenn Pure	2019-05-12 11:27:05	Darryl, good to see you posting to the critique gallery for your second post. This is a species I'd love to see and photograph myself one day. I like that you've managed to get a little group of these together in the shot. I imagine they are like other fairy-wrens and are quite social. I'd encourage you to go out and try for more shots as I think this one could be improved on in other areas though. The main issue for me is that the foreground birds are not in sharp focus. The back underside of the rear bird looks like it was where the camera locked focus. Were you using centre point (or single point) focus when you took this? If not I'd encourage you to try that and hold the focus point over the bird or part of the frame that you want to be in sharp focus, half press the shutter to lock focus, recompose and take the shot. In this case, I'd have wanted the foreground bird in sharpest focus as it is the one we can see the most of. In terms of framing, I would normally say that the proportion of the frame taken up by the birds in relation to the overall crop here is about right. However, due to the fairly distracting foliage and branches in this shot, in this instance I'd be tempted to crop tighter to cut some of that out as a general rule. In this case, it's going to be difficult to do with the birds a little out of focus, making the birds larger in the crop is only going to emphasise the softness of the focus. It's also not ideal to have the main subject (in this case the foreground bird) obstructed as it is here by the twig in front of it. However, I recognise that sometimes we have to take what we get. I did wonder though that if you'd moved more to your left you could have reduced the amount of obstruction? Finally the light here is quite strong and has created strong highlights and shadows. Using the lighten shadows and reduce highlights sliders in photoshop could help reduce the harshness of the light and bring out more detail especially in the highlights on the birds which look blown are lacking in detail at present. Hope this helps.
Darryl Lacey	2019-05-15 14:03:44	--Thanks Glenn for your very helpful comments. There was no avoiding twigs, but it turns out this particular photo has (centre) focus locked on a twig behind the back bird! I've found another with focus locked on the front bird's eye, but a less interesting overall composition. Thanks again Darryl

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EXIF.UndefinedTag:0xA434: 18.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6

	103/283 in Critique Gallery
	2/2 by Darryl Lacey
	55/141 of Splendid Fairy-wren
	479/1059 of Fairy-wrens, Emu-wrens and Grasswrens
	15662/34449 Overall
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