Day 10 - Tuesday, May 1, 2012

I have come to the realization that the less you work on getting a good picture, the more work you have to put into it during post processing.  Yesterday I didn't really try too much when it came to taking pictures.  Well, that's not necessarily true.  I wanted to stick with my wildlife theme this week, and these bulging white sacks are very easy bait for getting pretty birds.  Problem?  Finches are very very skittish birds.  I wanted to get closer, but as soon as I started to creep around the house they took to the pine trees.  This picture was taken at full zoom with my 70-300mm lens from inside of my house.  The original picture can be seen here. 

As you can see, I needed to do a significant amount of changes in post-processing.  I ended up brushing over the bird, raising shadow detail, exposure, and saturation.  I also did the iris enhancement as well, which added a little extra detail to the eye.  I may have exposed it to much, but it made the bird pop, which I liked.  The only thing about the photograph that I do not care for is the fact that in the background, the way the grass was growing makes it look like there's a halo around the bird due to editing, which wasn't the case.

Exposure Information:
1/80 sec, f/5.6, 300mm (450 effective 35mm), ISO 100.  Post processing done via Lightroom.