This is an emerald tanager I photographed in Costa Rica. Green is my favorite color, and if I see an animal, bird, or insect that's green, I have to capture it. The problem with the original picture was the bird had been drawn to a feeding platform by a piece of papaya, and when I took this shot the fruit was right next to the bird in the frame. It looked ridiculous. But, since I love green, I had to make the photo look good. I took this shot with a Canon 500mm f/4 along with a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 700mm of focal length. That meant the depth of field was quite shallow, and if you look closely at this image you'll see that the leg closest to the camera is sharp while the other leg, just an inch or two further from the camera, is out of focus. In order to place the bird on other perch, the branch I chose had to have focus fall-off to match the loss of depth of field on the tanager. I found such an image in my photo library, a shot also from Costa Rica, but it had another bird on it. I cloned out the bird and then made a precise selection of the tanager with the pen tool. I copied that to the clipboard and pasted it onto the branch. I had to build subtle shadows under the feet (using the burn tool) to imply the emerald tanager was really there. My settings for the tanager shot were 1/500, f/9, and 2500 ISO.
0 Comments