"Paddy's Pig" wrote in message
...

Wendy this is a pretty good start! Way to go girl!

I didn't realize you were shooting with a DSLR until I saw this shot,
which would have been near impossible with a P&S camera. I checked your
EXIF file and see that it is a Sony DSLR A-100, a camera that pretty much
matches my Nikon D80 spec-for-spec. And obviously Sony offers a little
remote triggering device for it like I have. You'll find that invaluable.

With regard to this particular shot I would have cut out a lot of the
extraneous stuff and concentrated more on the bird himself. Sort of like
this: (more to come)

Obviously my cropping example looks lousy because I took your reduced size
photo and blew part of it up so the picture is coming apart in my
reproduction - but you'll get the point. The bird is the subject - not the
feeder.

I can't tell if you shot this at your full frame size of 3872 X 2592 pixels
or at a reduced size. Likewise, I can't tell what processing software you
used nor whether you shot in JPEG or in RAW. But I suspect that if you shot
the full sized frame you could probably crop the original similarly to my
example and still wind up with respectable image quality in a 1024 pixel
wide picture. Give it a shot and see how it looks.

In the future, concentrate on getting closer to the bird so you don't have
to crop out a lot of unneeded background. I set up my tripod around a foot
or so from where I want the bird to be. Then I zone focus to a point in the
air that is directly in front of the feeder and then lock out the autofocus
feature so that it won't shift from that setting.

And another important thing I've done is that I got rid of my feeder that
had a ring around it for the birds to perch on. As long as they can sit on
the other side away from you or your camera they'll do it everytime. So I
took control of that situation by providing a feeder that only has one
spout --- one place for the bird to get its reward. That assures that it
will always "pose" where I want it to pose.

I noticed that you shot this picture at a shutter speed of only 1/125 sec.
I'm surprised that you were able to freeze his movements as well as you did
but that was made possible by the brief duration of your flash.

The picture is a little dark so I looked in your EXIF file to see what ISO
speed you had set and unfortunately that space was blank and I couldn't
tell. The A-100 can be set anywhere from ISO 100 to ISO 1600. I usually
set mine at either ISO 320 or ISO 400. And I'm trying to place the feeder
in an area where there's an ample amount of sunlight if possible so that I
can use a fast shutter speed and not have to rely on my flash to freeze the
action. The flash should only be used at 1/4 or 1/2 power and only to fill
in shadow areas. I like the highlight effect it creates on the bird's eye
too.
--
Pat Durkin

email: t o b a c c o h a t e r 1 @ y a h o o . c o m