Goldfinch - Carduelis carduelis parva

You have a humungous portfolio that would take me days to navigate, yet the few that I have viewed are very, very good.

Sometimes an image says a 1000 words, but as you have chosen the Gif* route, I was unable to show my thoughts, visually.

Your title is very apt in that the colourful habitat does camaflauge your subjects...... possibly too well.

My thoughts would be along the lines of darkening the darker areas and then lightening the lighter colours which I believe would create a touch of "isolation" to the subjects, heighten their colouring and tweak up the definition overall. In my mind, this all works very well... however the "proof of the pudding...... " ,

Make no mistake, this a damn fine spotting and capture and not an everyday experience for most of us, so I commend your efforts in this capture.

Well done.

Best regards

Hi Grayham,

thank you very much for your thoughtful critique, kind comments, great appreciation and technical advice.

I've shot this photo from rather far away. The photo as shown here is only a very tiny part of the entire image my camera had caught.

While taking the shot, I've barely noticed the chick, even through the tele lens. With the unguarded eye, I only saw something moving between the leaves. A professional birder with a pair of binoculars, standing next to me, told me what was going on.

As this is a nature shot and not a studio set up, I've only increased the brightness of this crop of a much larger photo.

Trying to accentuate the visibility of the birds' part would, in my opinion, not reflect the real life situation of nature allowing those birds to make themselves rather difficult to see for a predator like, say, Homo sapiens.

But that's a subjective, rather philosophical matter, probably suitable for lengthy discussions. And, as you rightly remarked: one image might tell more than a thousand words, I'll leave it at that.

Cheers!

Sam