Show your Bird Portraits

Some from today... Common wax-bill, subadult (male) Northern Cardinal, Red-whiskered Bulbul ("desperately searching for birds", in this case it's fledglings:)) and fledglings of Chestnut Munia.
Beautiful, I hope that the subadult (male) Northern Cardinal selects perches more suitable to photography when he’s grown up.
 
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Beautiful, I hope that the subadult (male) Northern Cardinal selects perches more suitable to photography when he’s grown up.
You don't even have to wait until then to fix it. Just before lunch I took a photo of a Skylark singing while perched on and partly obscured by a metal fence and netting. 30 seconds and Photoshop and Hey Presto! (I chose the one with the right colour legs imagined by PS.) And as afterthought a shot from last month where only the metal fence perch needed changing. It's scary what can be done now.


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You don't even have to wait until then to fix it. Just before lunch I took a photo of a Skylark singing while perched on and partly obscured by a metal fence and netting. 30 seconds and Photoshop and Hey Presto! (I chose the one with the right colour legs imagined by PS.) And as afterthought a shot from last month where only the metal fence perch needed changing. It's scary what can be done now.
I know that pretty much everything can be changed with PS and/or other AI based tools. I do not mind (small) changes that keep the image representing the natural situation, but ‘object’ to ‘major’ changes, as in your examples. But everyone is free do to as he/she likes and is transparent about it.

In your second example PS removed the toes of the birds leg that is furthest from the camera.
 
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Common tern (Sterna hirundo) shaking it’s wings while preening. Taken last friday, same as the white wagtail, we finally got good light at the end of the day

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Nicely done, Pieter.
 
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You don't even have to wait until then to fix it. Just before lunch I took a photo of a Skylark singing while perched on and partly obscured by a metal fence and netting. 30 seconds and Photoshop and Hey Presto! (I chose the one with the right colour legs imagined by PS.) And as afterthought a shot from last month where only the metal fence perch needed changing. It's scary what can be done now.


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"It's scary what can be done now."
What is really scary is the human's ability to cut exactly the branch on which they are sitting...
One day (looks pretty soon) I have to change my "The equipment that matters, is you" to "The equipment that matters is the one that is making your (?) photos". Very sad...
 
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Something only heavily cropped and not added to, a European Goldfinch, one of our prettiest birds and thriving.

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You got it in the right angle: I don't like how the beak in this bird is looking when the head is in exact profile. Nice photo! If I was in your shoos I would not be ashamed to lift little bit the shades on the white-red-bill area...
 
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Spent the afternoon playing with an old rig. This was the first setup I had that would deliver decent shots of hummingbirds in the bush. The camera is a Panasonic FZ80 with a 1.7x front mounted TC. The camera was designed for such a TC and has a setting that compensates the image stabilizer that works quite will. The key is the TC. It is a Nikon TC-E17ED. Some engineer at Nikon went completely nuts and made a truly pro piece of glass to strap on a Coolpix 8800 (8 MP camera). Production ended in 2006 and the TC cost more than the cameras it was meant to attach to. I added an adapter ring to get it to fit the Panny and it adds essentially no degradation to the image but extends the range of the zoom to a bit over 2000mm (equivalent), so you could think of this as an early take on a Nikon P950 (The Panny does have Raw files, so the P900 doesn't count). I was curious as to what the combination of this old rig with modern software could produce and the result is pretty good with the caveat that the keeper rate is very low, thanks to the abysmally slow CDAF on the camera. This kind of experiment truly makes me appreciate the R7 + 200-800.

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