Cloud Forest Couriers: Life of the Plate-billed Mountain Toucan

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Story of the Image

Mountain Toucans belong to the family of high elevation toucans, as the name suggests, and only occur in the humid highland forests in the Andes of South America.

This individual was photographed very close to the town of Mindo in Ecuador in the month of February.

Gear/Preparing the Scene

Over the years, these birds have become more familiar with humans and tend to get closer and closer. Feeding stations at some locations also make it easier for the birds to feed during the rainy months when there is not much food left in the forests. I brought along my longest telephoto lens and my fastest full-frame camera , to photograph this scene. A tripod was also essential as I was shooting at very high ISO and low light.

Composing the Shot

Mountain Toucans are shy, which is why the only way to photograph them is in a hide. I had to patiently wait for hours to get the bird to come down and get some shots. The owner of the property is a smart man and had set up a feeder next to a water body, so I used it to my advantage to create an interesting frame!

I left the White Balance and Exposure untouched. I did, however, fix the darks and whites as they seemed to be overdone in the raw file. I added some Vibrance and now the image was ready for editing.

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As a nature photographer I use one of the fastest cameras in the business (or I used to before switching to mirrorless)— a Canon 1dx, which gives me fast frame rates but at very low resolution. It is for this reason, I try not to not crop these images.

I added a layer of Brightness and Contrast to add more depth.

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Next, I noticed that some parts of the bird (plates on bill, area near the eye) were blown out. For me, the easiest way to achieve this is by selecting the area manually and reducing the exposure.

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BEFORE

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AFTER

Next up was color correction.

As discussed in a previous case study, I always work on shadows and highlights and never touch the mid-tones. Subtle changes are what I am after on all my images.

Next, I cloned out a black spot on the top left corner of the image

The image is now ready to be resized and saved. As a rule of thumb, I always resize a vertical image with 1800 pixels on the longer side and this image was no exception.

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Once resized, I then use smart sharpen.

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Now it’s time to save it in the right profile.

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For web prints, I use sRGB. For physical prints, I use Adobe RGB
The final step is to save it as a JPEG at the highest resolution.

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Final Image:

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About the Bird

This bird, also known as laminated hill-Toucan, laminated mountain-toucan, and plain-billed mountain toucan known for its bright plumage and the yellow bill is a resident of the cloud forest of the Andes. It is native to the western slope of Ecuador and the far end of South Colombia and can be found in pairs or small groups. The song of this near-threatened bird starts with a rattle that is repeated every few seconds followed by a far-reaching metallic wail.

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