{"id":20131,"date":"2013-11-22T06:51:23","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T13:51:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=20131"},"modified":"2013-11-22T06:51:23","modified_gmt":"2013-11-22T13:51:23","slug":"a-northern-flicker-and-the-kindness-of-a-stranger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/22\/a-northern-flicker-and-the-kindness-of-a-stranger\/","title":{"rendered":"A Northern Flicker And The Kindness Of A Stranger"},"content":{"rendered":"

In early 2008 I was a frustrated novice photographer.\u00a0 I had recently invested heavily in an expensive “bird lens” and switched over from shooting in JPEG to RAW all in an effort to get high quality shots but it just wasn’t happening.\u00a0 My images were not as sharp as they should be and I couldn’t figure out why.\u00a0 I had joined an online nature photography critique forum (Nature Photographers Network) and posted images there regularly in an effort to improve my\u00a0skills but it seemed like I had reached a plateau above\u00a0which\u00a0I couldn’t ascend.\u00a0 And then this Northern Flicker and a kind stranger came along.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern<\/a>1\/800, f\/9, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I typically find flickers extremely difficult to get close to but this one was an exception.\u00a0 It was clinging to the side of a maple tree in my front yard on a cold March morning and let me\u00a0get very close (this image is full frame).\u00a0 I took dozens of shots of the bird because I was hand-holding my very heavy lens in low light and framing it vertically was tough (I was too inexperienced to even think of taking off my tc).\u00a0 I was so excited to get a full frame shot of a\u00a0flicker that I immediately posted it to NPN for critique, despite the fact that the lighting angle isn’t ideal and there’s an out of focus branch coming out of the neck of the flicker.\u00a0 The image was received fairly well but not as enthusiastically as I had hoped.<\/p>\n

Then out of the blue I received a private email from\u00a0Dave Sparks, an\u00a0NPN member whose name I barely recognized.\u00a0\u00a0Dave gently suggested that my images weren’t living up to their potential because of issues with my sharpening technique.\u00a0 Since I had switched over to shooting RAW I didn’t know what I was doing in processing, sharpening in particular.\u00a0 That initial email developed into an extended conversation where Dave coached me through a sharpening technique that I’ve been using ever since with only minor modifications.<\/p>\n

Since that time long ago Dave and I have become good friends, though we’ve still never met (he lives in Florida).\u00a0 Dave admitted to me that he was hesitant to reach out like he did because he didn’t know how I would\u00a0recieve the suggestion that my images weren’t as sharp as they should be\u00a0(some photographers are notoriously thin-skinned about things like that)\u00a0but he took\u00a0the chance and I’ll be forever grateful.<\/p>\n

So thank you, Dave Sparks.\u00a0 Your willingness to risk made a huge difference in my photography.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In early 2008 I was a frustrated novice photographer. I had recently invested heavily in an expensive “bird lens” and switched over from shooting in JPEG to RAW all in an effort to get high quality shots but it just wasn’t happening. My images were not as sharp as they should be and I couldn’t figure out why. <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,334,1496],"tags":[1497,1428,1091,462,1144,463,1034,1760],"class_list":["post-20131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-northern-flickers","tag-colaptes-auretus","tag-critique","tag-jpeg","tag-nature-photographers-network","tag-northern-flicker","tag-npn","tag-raw","tag-sharpening-technique"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/northern-flicker-4539b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-5eH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}