Bulbul

[Bobobird]

The cotton tree flower shots would not be complete without their most ardent fan - the Bulbul.

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2.

[Dave Humphries]

Looks like you handled a difficult sky well there Bobo

If only we could get up to their level (without frightening them away), sadly it seems some birds are destined to always be shot from below.

Good work as always,

[jeeperman]

Dave said it well. Nice work Bobo.

[Bobobird]

Thanks Dave and Paul. The biggest task here was cloning out all the distractions.

Still wondering if I should have used the flash to throw a bit of fill to the bottoms of the high up shots.

[Mutley]

Great stuff.
How on earth did you manage to get the colour so vivid against a grey sky?
Everytime I try this I end up with just silhouettes.

[jprzybyla]

Nicely done Bobo, the second is my favorite.

[stardelta]

nice shots bobo ,2nd is my favourite and as others have said fantastic job on the sky.

[Bobobird]

Thanks Steve, Joe, Glenn.

Credit for the colours should go to Joe who gave me a tip about using vibrance in the Red Silk Cotton Tree thread. Red Silk Cotton Tree

As can be seen in both this and the other thread, the subjects were all backlit with a very bright sky. So the first thing to do was ensure that the sky does not blow. That resulted in using AV with +2EV. This setting also helped not blow the reds. Everything else then just fell in place using the aperture and or ISO to adjust for DOF and light. Thankfully the ground was also pretty light and reflective so was throwing some light back up the trees. I am still wondering if a flash would have improved the darker undersides.

The rest was all pp, red is not an issue as it is naturally vibrant and being backlit more so. The biggest difficulty was cleaning up the birds surrounding areas. Experimented with various crops to try to minimize the amount of cloning required and settled on a square but rather tight crop.

The following 2 pics will give some idea of the "clutter" that had to be dealt with. There were plenty of these birds around but I managed to get only 2 with a relatively unobstructed view.