Early bird dinner

[Nuclear Bee]

Longtime lurker and in need of some feedback on this image I happened to capture today. I was driving down a residential street to see a Red Tail Hawk dive and nail a grey squirrel. I make a quick u-turn on this quiet street and parked to observe this magnificent bird begin to dismantle an unsuspecting squirrel.
Captured with a 7d, 40mm, ISO100, f/5, and 1/160

In retrospect I should have opened the aperture to make the brown bird pop from the brown background

[Rienzphotoz]

In an ideal world you could have made some changes to your camera settings and composition, to make this image a lot better but we don't always live in an ideal world and in waiting to change settings/composition, you probably would have had the bird fly away by that time ... considering the situation, I think you did a good job of capturing a rare image. I've taken the liberty of post processing, hope you don't mind ... I am not a professional and I also did not spend a lot of time on it ... if the original RAW file was available, with a bit more time spent on PP, I think a lot more detail/sharpness could be achieved.

PS. Apart from cropping, all I did was very basic stuff:
1. Change white balance
2. Brighten / sharpen the eyes
3. Clone out the distractions (branches etc)
4. Blurred the background a tiny bit
... all in that order.

[alexanderferdinand]

Crop it. Only the bird on the lawn.
As I would do it.
Nice shot!

[pierceography]

Nice.  Interesting that you were able to get that close with a 40mm lens.

[bjd]

if the original RAW file was available, with a bit more time spent on PP, I think a lot more detail/sharpness could be achieved.

Hi, so please tell me what else you woul do apart from sharpening to bring out more detail?
I can only think of maybe adding some contrast, oh and maybe some Clarity in LR.

I'm also astounded that the bird hasn't flown away yet. Good shot though.
In some ways he appears to be pretty confident, he's probably thinking "just try to take this off me boy..."!


Cheers Brian

[scottkinfw]

Nice shot!

Amazing what happens when you have your camera and you keep an eye out for wildlife.

I think you need to crop out some of the background to start, then see what you need to do from there.

sek

Longtime lurker and in need of some feedback on this image I happened to capture today. I was driving down a residential street to see a Red Tail Hawk dive and nail a grey squirrel. I make a quick u-turn on this quiet street and parked to observe this magnificent bird begin to dismantle an unsuspecting squirrel.
Captured with a 7d, 40mm, ISO100, f/5, and 1/160

In retrospect I should have opened the aperture to make the brown bird pop from the brown background

[bchernicoff]

i wouldn't lament the aperture so much. f/2.8 vs f/5 wouldn't have made big difference in isolating the bird. You can apply blur in PS and use a gradient layer mask to realistically ramp up the OOF effect further out from the center.

[Rienzphotoz]

if the original RAW file was available, with a bit more time spent on PP, I think a lot more detail/sharpness could be achieved.

Hi, so please tell me what else you woul do apart from sharpening to bring out more detail?
I can only think of maybe adding some contrast, oh and maybe some Clarity in LR.
Cheers Brian

Nothing more really ... with the RAW file I would try and add a bit more sharpness/detail using Nik Sharpner Pro & maybe mess around a little bit with the colors/contrast.

[Nuclear Bee]

Thank you all for the comments and especially Rienzphotoz for taking the time to PP this image (your efforts produced the type of results I was looking for). I do shoot in RAW but have yet to attempted much if any PP and only work in iPhoto. Someone please apply a little pressure to make the jump to LightRoom. Again, many thanks for viewing and commenting.

[Rienzphotoz]

Thank you all for the comments and especially Rienzphotoz for taking the time to PP this image (your efforts produced the type of results I was looking for). I do shoot in RAW but have yet to attempted much if any PP and only work in iPhoto. Someone please apply a little pressure to make the jump to LightRoom. Again, many thanks for viewing and commenting.

You are welcome. If you have never used lightroom before it can seem a bit complicated ... (it took me 3 attempts over a period of 4 years to actually like lightroom, (I used to find it a bit too complex and never really liked its interface) but now lightroom is my primary source of organizing and editing ... since you use iPhoto, you might find the Apple's Aperture a bit more easy to make the transition and its only $79

[Dick]

I do shoot in RAW but have yet to attempted much if any PP and only work in iPhoto. Someone please apply a little pressure to make the jump to LightRoom.

Why not just use Aperture then? You can then more or less just continue with your current iPhoto setup and add Aperture goodies to it. I use Aperture since it works well with Apple gear. All the images I edited with Aperture are available on my iPad & phone too without any additional work. There really aren't any major reasons to use LR instead.