Found In Nature

Signs of Spring, you can find them here if you are looking hard enough.  I’m on the lookout, so I have noticed the increased number of birds that I can see outside my kitchen window in the morning.  This little sparrow really likes the cover of a pile of sticks we are collecting from a recent storm:

ISO 1600 19mm 0ev f/5.6 1/100

I’ll show you the original in a moment but I decided to convert this image to black and white for Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge: Found in Nature  I used my point and shoot to get this image. This little bird was pretty still, so I was pretty confident the camera would get a decent shot.

I opened the original in Camera Raw and increased the exposure and the clarity.  Then I converted it to black and white.  From there I opened it in Photoshop, cropped and sharpened it a bit.

Here is the original:

ISO 1600 19mm 0ev f/5.6 1/100

One of the reasons I cropped the photo was to make the bird look like it was in a more natural setting.  I also wanted to make him a little more obvious, since he gets lost a bit in the black and white.  What do you think?  Does black and white work here?

Cheers!

The Family that Dropped By

While I was filling my bird feeders the other day, I accidentally spilled some bird seed on our front step.  After I was inside, I realized that some sparrows were eating it.  I thought this might be a good opportunity to take some bird pictures that did not feature our feeders.  Here is my favorite picture of the series that I took:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/8 1/250

I got this shot by setting up my camera on a tripod and using a remote trigger.  My camera equipment is outside and I am watching from inside waiting for the sparrows to come back and pose, which they were nice enough to do.  I set my ISO to 100 because although it was still pretty early, it was really bright out.  I used an f-stop of f/8 and shutter speed of 1/250 to stop the motion and retain detail.

Once I was finished shooting I cropped this image and then edited it in Photoshop.  I changed the levels and turned it into a black and white image.  I started with the blue filter setting, but did tweak it a bit as I thought the blue was too dark on the wings of the sparrows.  Here is the image as it was in my camera:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/8 1/250

Fifty two species of sparrow live here in North America.  That is one very large family, and family is the theme of this week’s black and white photography challenge hosted by Sonel

Cheers!