Jacobin Cuckoo

[Anshul Jain]

Jacobin Cuckoo @ Gurgaon Biodiversity Park
7D, 500 +1.4x, handheld.
1/320, f5.6, Iso400, 25%crop

[Mrudul Godbole]

Lovely light. Liked the mixed clean background. Good catch light and eye contact. Was any cloning done? Thanks for sharing.

[Anshul Jain]

Thanks. No cloning was done.

[Anshul Jain]

I did some selective NR in the background though.

[Jim Manjooran]

excellent work AJ...!...

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Anshul,
I agree with Mrudul. Nice eye contact. The branch attracts attention. In digital it is easy to get carried away. Pulling the sliders will in a moment change the colours and saturation etc. However, we have to be careful. In this case, the white in the underparts especially near the vent is not white anymore.

A lot of people do noise reduction without tackling the root cause of the noise. Expose your image well and shoot full frame. You wont have the noise issue. I never do noise reduction beyond the default in lightroom. You should retain details. In this image very less portion of the cobwebs are visible.

People use multiple layers to remove background noise, sharpen the subject, clone the branches etc etc. However, please remember that for reputed natural history publications these are a strict NO. For editorial applications these changes are not allowed. Ofcourse in India, publications copy images even from net, so that is another story. However, I just want to point out that certain habits can creep in without we realising and I have seen that stopping the development of lot of promising youngsters.

As they say coal under severe pressure transforms into diamonds. Push yourself to get it right in the field. Critique your images thoroughly. You will do great.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Anshul Jain]

Thank you sir for your honest critique and suggestions. I myself have noticed that if the exposure is correct in the first place, very little NR is required, I have started to give more attention to this aspect.