Red Sunbird

This was shot in Pulau Ubin, as I was resting and having a drink at a roadside stall. This little sunbird landed on the bushes nearby and flited about, jumping from flower to flower.

My experiences with birding so far have not yielded anything nice. The only birds that I could capture were domesticated pigeons. The reach of the 250mm lens means that I have to approach within 10m to get a shot, and by then they would have flown away.

For this, I knew I had only a few seconds to shoot, so I grabbed the camera, extended the reach to maximum, and shot away. Approaching bit by bit, I tied to hide behind chairs and ignored the fact that there was a big red chair visible in the frame (which I would crop away later). The emphasis was on trying to get as good an angle and pose as possible; I knew the bird would fly away in seconds, and any shot would do. (Later, when my father happened to see the picture, he saw that there was a red chair in the corner, and chided me saying "this shows that you are a lousy photography". I wanted to argue but decided not to bother. Haha.)

Out of the maybe 8 frames I shot, this was one of the last, when the bird noticed me and made eye contact. Focus and exposure was good, but I had to crop some and the auto-ISO was at 800, which meant noise and loss of fine detail in the feathers.

I did quite a bit of post-processing to this final shot, but each played an important purpose: cropping; selective 100% NR to the background and 50% NR to the foreground, leaving the feathers untouched; slight desaturation to the hibiscus flower to avoid overpowering the bird; USM to sharpen the catchlight in the eyes; vignetting to give depth;find edges to sharpen.

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