Cloudy day hummer

[rw2]

Had to shot this at 800 iso. It tends to get a little grainy for me. Shot it wide open with the 400mm hand held.

[stevefossimages]

Very sweet shot of an immature male.

[Cooper911]

I like the colourful BG and inclusion of flowers in this capture. Nice work.

[JimLittle]

Beautiful bokeh colors as well as bird colors----cool!

[stevefossimages]

rw, meant to mention it in my first reply, but you can lasso the bird and just sharpen the bird selectively, which cuts down on the grainy BG you get when the whole image is sharpened. Maybe you did that already but if not, just an fyi.

[rrdjserv@earthlink.net]

Brilliant colors, rw2. Great capture. --Rick

[AeroSmith]

Wonderful color and composition. A truly fabulous shot!

[Flo]

Gorgeous...I had a slow start to my honeysuckle vine.....not alot of nectar for the hummers this year by flower.

[poloman]

This is a truly beautiful shot. Eye candy.:)

[rw2]

rw, meant to mention it in my first reply, but you can lasso the bird and just sharpen the bird selectively, which cuts down on the grainy BG you get when the whole image is sharpened. Maybe you did that already but if not, just an fyi.
I did that and then also applied a little blur to the backgound also. Thanks for the info.

[Gary Fairhead]

Dynamite capture here and I like everything about the image. Position on the bird and relation to flower in profile is as good as it gets. The flowers are gorgeous as well and the BG is spectacular. Wish it was mine!

If it was mine I would sharpen the bird just a tad and remove the noise from the BG. One painstaking way to do this but well worth it on a great image like this is to use the blur brush in Photoshop and for this image I would take a hard brush at 100% strength and blur the BG. This is as close to a noise remover in a brush as i have found and takes a while to contour everything but works nicely. Use a history brush to correct any errors. I would then USM the entire image but very slightly at ( Amount 45%, Radius 1 and Threshold 0 ). Very subtle but you can see the difference. This introduces little noise to the BG as the BG is so clean at this point but it will highlite any noise you did not remove with the blur brush. Just go over those spots with the blur brush and its done...an image like this would take about 10 minutes and this is what it would look like...again...subtlety is IMHO the key.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a300/g2a/RW.jpg