Do I or don’t I take out the branches and distracting elements in a bird picture? Personally I have a hard time following rules that are imposed on doing any type of art work. This stems from my fine art school days. On one level keeping in all the details of the nature photo capture seems “correct” but on the other hand getting the feeling and beauty of the bird seems most important.
It is really difficult to find some speicies of birds that are not enmeshed in a myriad of leaves and branches.
In the picture of the Red-winged Blackbird, I removed some branches that I felt were distracting. I kept in the blurred out branch in the background because it seemed to balance out the composition. And I do like to represent the fact that Red-winged Blackbirds do perch on and among many branches.

The picture of this adorable Tree Swallow was taken at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge Sunday April 11. I had a big breakthrough with my Canon EOS 7D camera this weekend. I have owned this camera for about four months and have been really frustrated trying to get better pictures than I did with the Canon EOS40D that I owned before. I am very motivated because I love having the 18MP size on the Canon EOS7D because I can crop way down in order to get in close on a small bird such as this.
When I first started with the Canon EOS7D, I pretty much used it as I did the Canon 40D not wanting to spend the time learning the new autofocus system, etc. Reading the CanonEOS7D manual was not very helpful. I purchased the Charlotte Lowrie book which was one of the first to come out and was not inspired. I got a little more information from the Magic Lantern Guide for the Canon EOS7D but I remained frustrated at the noisy soft pictures i was getting.
Additional I was scouring the web and nothing struck me.
I purchased the Arthur Morris guide and a small thing he said about how the sharpening is really soft in the RAW format (and can be made more sharp in the menu) made me review my sharpening options. I was using the clarity function in lightroom and the smart sharpen option in Photoshop CS3 and getting really lousy results.
I set upon checking out what other options I could do – like unsharp mask, etc. What worked for me was using the sharpening option in Lightroom – especially the detail slider. I bypassed clarity entirely. I feel like I have overcome a big hurdle and am no longer ready to through the Canon EOS7D out the window. And I can continue my learning curve with some clarity as to where to go next.

The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge is especially delightful this time of year as the season is changing. I think I love the smells the best as I first start walking from the Visitor Center to the West Pond. Each step brings a new scent with the smell of the salt water everpresent blending in.
The Song Sparrows are present at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge year round. Their beautiful song is always a treat. I took the picture of this Song Sparrow just as I entered the West Pond path. He was busy foraging on the ground and paid absolutely no attention to me and my camera.

The picture of this Common Grackle was taken in Prospect Park, Brooklyn on April 4. There was a dense fog in the morning which gave me the opportunity to play with foglight. I got this shot as the fog was beginning to lift and the sun was breaking through. This Grackle puffed up very similar to the Red-winged Blackbird each time it sounded which is what created this unusual pose with the feathers “extended” like this.
When I opened the picture in Adobe Lightroom, I could not believe the colors that were captured. I enhanced the saturation just a bit and dodged some of the lighter areas but other than the usual sharpening, I did very little else. I decided that I like the branch configuration as is because it echoed the cragginess of the bird itself and I really love the various sizes, shapes and intensity of the lines that are created by the various branches which was helped by the fog.
This Grackle is very far from being common.

Arrived at the Oceanside Nature Center in Hempstead Long Island just as a huge flock of Brants were arriving.

The picture of this Mexican Jay was taken in Portal, Arizona. The Mexican Jay is a very social, gregarious bird. The Mexican Jay lives in social groups that may include multiple breeding pairs, and group members may feed young at multiple nests within the group territory.