Stellar Jay !
Feb, 2016Views
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Awards
Contest Finalist in The Beauty Of Birds Photo Contest
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Contest Finalist in Birds Of A Feather Photo Contest
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Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Behind The Lens
Location
This image was captured in my backyard. I was sitting on our deck with my camera and saw this beautiful Stellar Jay land on the fence that separates part of my property. The back yard extendsTime
The morning I captured this image it was overcast and that helped create a vey uniform exposure. The image was capture at 10:15 am on May 16th 2015Lighting
I wanted to capture the bird set against a very smoothed and soft green background. The bird landed on the rail of the fencing and using a relatively open f stop of 6.3, the camera helped create the very soft green background. The brightly colored bird set against the back drop helped the bird to really stand out.Equipment
The camera I used was a Canon 5d mark 3 and lens I used was a Tampon 150 to 600 mm. The image was captured hand held without a tripod. In order to freeze any movement by the bird I had to push the shutter speed to 1/200 sec. To get the right exposure I was going for I had set the ISO to 2000. I used every bit of the lens for this image and therefore the focal length was 600 mm.Inspiration
Back when this image was captured we had several types of bird feeders set up. The location of our deck was perfect to capture shots of birds helping themselves to the food in the various feeders. We had been watching this one Stellar jay flying around picking all the peanuts he could get. Stellar jays are one of my favorite birds to photograph.Editing
The image benefited from some light post processing including a good crop to isolate the subjects, some adjustment brush work to sharpen and make the feathers sharp and distinct. And finally I added a bit of noise reduction to help with the higher ISOl levels in the background area.In my camera bag
I usually carry 2 cameras (Canon 5D mark 3 and Canon 5D mark 4) My lenses are Tamron 150 -600 mm, Canon 70 to 200mm , Canon 24 to 70 mm , Cannon 16 - 35mm0 I have gitzo carbon fiber tripod with a Really Right Stuff ball head I will have some circular polarizing filters and a graduated neutral density filter.Feedback
Photographing birds is a lot of fun but very challenging . You need to be prepared to spend some time finding the right angles and exposure to get nice images. Birds in general are small and they move around very quickly, so be prepared to set your camera quickly and shoot in burst mode to capture possible movement.
