Super Fairy Wren (male)

[kipper]

Ok, this is the real deal. No mistaken this little fella. Gordon, put away your book....there is no need!
Have quite a few more shots of it, however the background texture and the bokeh is really annoying me. It distracts from the subject.

Click for larger.

<a href="http://darryl.smugmug.com/photos/21632572-O.jpg"></a>

[mic]

Kipper, great shot you Bird Stalker you

Your backgrounds have been annoying me for a few shots now, I don't know what you are doing but they look grainy, not like good soft Bokeh that you would expect from the mighty Big Gun VR ?

My 180mm stubby gets better bokeh and it shouldn't compared to yours

I'm not having a dig, just something I have been noteing on your great shots.

Mic.

[MCWB]

Yeah, it certainly looks weird. The background almost looks motion-blurred? The wren looks cool though, awesome blue!

[kipper]

As I said to Nicole, I hate the background. Not much could be done though. Think I was on shutter priority dialled into about 1/400, think the aperture was around F/6. The bokeh is absolutely horrid
I'm thinking about selecting everything besides the bird and the branch and doing a bit of a blur.

[Nicole]

These guys are really pretty. Your shots are getting better and just wait to you nail one! I think it would definitely improve if you do the background selection and blur.

[yeocsa]

As I said to Nicole, I hate the background. Not much could be done though. Think I was on shutter priority dialled into about 1/400, think the aperture was around F/6. The bokeh is absolutely horrid
I'm thinking about selecting everything besides the bird and the branch and doing a bit of a blur.

Hi Kipper,

Nice catch there. You are getting better at stalking these birds. May i suggest that you use aperture preferred. F5.6 should be okay as they are so small. The bokeh, I am wondering if it is cause by the TC 1.7? I do know that the bokeh for 70 - 200VR is quite nice.

regards,

Arthur

[KerryPierce]

Nice, colorful shot, Kipper.

On the bokeh issue, there are several things at work. The DOF of this shot is very deep, several inches it looks like. That suggests that you were rather far from the subject. Small apertures, like f/6 or so, will give you much deeper DOF than you need to cover the subject, when you're that far away. Dunno any good way, short of keeping a DOF calculator and laser range finder with you, of being able to determine the proper aperture for distance, except for lots of shots/experience.

Another issue is that the image is oversharpened. There are distinct sharpening halos on the body and tail of the bird. That in turn makes your background OOF areas ( bokeh ) more granular rather than smooth.

There are several ways to address that issue, but being lazy, I use what I think is easiest. I duplicate the background layer. Sharpen the duplicate and erase everything but the subject. If the background still needs work after that, I shift to the bottom layer and either apply NR or a gaussian blur. I then flatten the image. If you don't oversharpen the subject and are careful about your erasing, using a soft, feathered brush on the subject edges, it will look perfectly natural when you're done.

[kipper]

Thanks for the tips. As you can see from the shot the subject is fairly small still in the frame. The image was cropped from 3008x2000 to about 1200x800, and then image resized to 984x564. Subject distance was about 6 - 8M I believe. These little things are about the size of a golf ball so very difficult to capture on my lens

[kipper]

Here's the original shot, just to show you how small the bird is in the frame. Was taken like I said at around about 8M away at 340MM focal length.


Click to enlarge.

<a href="http://darryl.smugmug.com/photos/21720247-O.jpg"></a>