In times like this, when the weather is hot and the birding is slow, it is time for….drum roll please………..Creative Editing.
Actually, I did get out for a little while Sunday morning. I didn’t want to spend too much time as I wanted to get home in time to watch Andre Beltre, of the Texas Rangers, get his 3000th base hit. In the history of baseball, only 30 others had accomplished that in their career. But, heck, you are not interested in hearing about baseball.
So, back to the original purpose of this post. While we were out, Ann, a couple of family friends, and I, were birding at San Angelo State Park. As I said, not too much going on, but we did spot a Northern Bobwhite perched and singing in the distance. In the distance, is an understatement, as we could barely see him with our naked eyes. I put my bean bag on the window sill, turned off the engine to prevent anymore vibrations. I settled my Canon 7D Mark II with my Tamron 150-600 G2 lens, on the beanbag. With that solid bed, I fired off a few shots at 1/1250 sec. @ f6.3, plus 1/3 stop of EV adjustment. ISO was 800, which promoted a little digital noise. Here is the original, looking through that long lens. I was at a distance of approximately 100 yards. Remember, with the naked eye it looked even much further away.
Northern Bobwhite
Since that was the only usable image from that outing, I loaded it into the computer to see if I could make something out of it in my digital darkroom. The result follows below. First, you can see how I first cropped it. In doing so, it left part of the tree taking up space, too close to the quail for my liking. Fortunately the sky was an even blue all around, so I just cloned the tree out very easily. After all, I was after a nice photo of the bird, not the tree. It was just a distraction in this case.
The first thing I did was get rid of the tiny bit of noise that the higher ISO of 800 created. There wasn’t much, as the Canon 7D Mk II handles high ISOs very nicely. But I have a plug-in, Topaz DeNoise, that does a great job of eliminating digital noise. Very easy to use.
Now, even with taking those precautions described above, the image wasn’t tack sharp. But that is going to happen when you crop an image so tightly, especially since the original was shot from so far away. I do all of my cropping and editing in Photoshop CS5. I do not use their sharpening, though. I have a great plug-in, called Focus Magic. Photoshop’s sharpening method with the so-called “Unsharp Mask” just messes with the pixels. Focus Magic actually corrects the focus very naturally. But having said that, evev after I use the Focus Magic, I sometimes tweak it a little more by using the Photoshop’s focus tool and paint it a little lightly. A very neat trick.
After that I tweaked the contrast and color saturation a bit. And there you have it, my little secret recipe that has been handed down over hundreds of years. Not bad, if I do say so myself. I hope you like it. 🙂 (Click on either image to see nice enlargements.)
Northern Bobwhite
And yes, in case you were wondering, Andre Beltre did get his 3,000th hit,. After that, I took a nap. 🙂
Oh, in case you missed it my beautiful 2018 calendars are here. Click this link for more information: https://bobzeller.wordpress.com/2017/07/25/2018-calendars-on-the-way/
Texas Tweeties by Bob Zeller 