A Red Winged Blackbird shot with a 70-300mm Nikon lens and an SB600 flash maxed out as to still the wings. Fun to catch these guys just as they take flight.
Cropped 640 x 480
Magic wand to isolate red areas on wings
Tweak up the saturation on the red wing portions
Inverse selection
Desaturate inverted selection
Photo filter to add "sepia"
Dodge and burn wings, bushes etc.
Blur tool on red winged areas smoothing transition
Unsharp mask
Select a rectangle for the border
Inverse selection
Delete selected border background into black
Save for web bicubic sharp
Send out to voters for slaughter
Statistics
Place: 65 out of 289 Avg (all users): 6.0076 Avg (commenters): 7.0769 Avg (participants): 5.8025 Avg (non-participants): 6.3084 Views since voting: 1306 Views during voting: 360 Votes: 264 Comments: 17 Favorites: 2 (view)
wow...outstanding capture! my yard is always full of red wing blackbirds and i love watching them and listening to them. love your composition here and the focus is spot on. well done, John!
Great capture of a red winged blackbird in flight. Like the detail of the feathers. I find the background blur a little distracting, but will vote you higher for the effort that went into getting this shot.
Great catch. Not an easy one, I've often tried to get one in flight without succes. The same picture with a blue sky backgroud and few white clouds would be the top one. -8
Not bad at all but the bokeh is really distracting and doesn´t do anything positive for the shot. Nice clarity of the bird though and I like the slight movement of the feathers.
I like this a lot. Very nice blow out of the background, great maintenance of detailing on the subject. The spot of orange, saturated, is a nice spark. 8 with possible bump.
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