Story Behind the Image
This shot of a truly remarkable species of Flycatcher was taken in the highland cloud forests of Costa Rica. While this species spends most of its time in the high canopies during the year, they do come down during the months of March and April to nest. These months provide the best opportunities for photography.
Location
The Cerro de la Muerte high elevation cloud forests in Costa Rica provide is the most ideal setting for these birds to exist. Places like Paraiso Quetzal provide an ideal breeding ground as they feature low bushes low bushes where they usually nest.
Preparing The Scene
To spend hundredss of hours in the forest understanding bird behavior gives me an edge in my photographic style. What does that mean? I always focus on behavior. More often than not, birds follow the same routine in all their activities. It was pretty much the same. Once I noticed that both males and females were bringing food for the young and would first wait in a nearby branch, I had to try putting up a nice perch with clean bg to see if they would land. I positioned myself twenty feet from the birds, knowing that anything closer would be a risk to the family, and waited.
Since the birds were used to a different landing spot, they didn’t use my branch initially. After a bit of a wait, they eventually landed, though. To my good fortune, the male came in with avocado fruit in its beak.
Composing the Shot
While looking at the bird through the viewfinder, I realized a dash of pink in the background. A branch full of pink flowers created the bokeh effect. I quickly recomposed and added more pink to the background by a slight change in the position of my camera . I went higher to include some of the background and got a very pleasing image.
Lighting
In terms of lighting, I have some ethical boundaries when taking pictures of nesting birds. First and foremost, I try to avoid shooting them if I cannot get at least 15-20 meters away from the nest. If I am too close, I just walk away and look for other birds. Even when I am far and notice that the birds are visibly disturbed, I abandon taking more pictures.
In this case, I used only the available light from the sky. Due to the clouds, I got a nice and diffused light on the bird. I would not have wanted to change a thing.
Perfecting In Post Processing
This is how my image straight out of my camera looked like:
As always, the first plan is to take care of the raw file and process it to get as close as possible to the final image.
In the raw editor, I added a lot of shadows as the low light underexposed the areas under the bird’s head. This was followed by a highlights correction on the fruit . To achieve that I first selected the fruit using the quick selection tool and then I created a brightness contrast layer. Reducing the brightness by 10 points corrected the exposure on the fruit. Did you know that these Flycatchers would feed on both fruits and small insects and lizards? Pretty crazy huh!
Next, I added more color to the overall image by increasing the Vibrance and Saturation. This step lifted the greens and pinks in the image.
Next, I opened the raw file to edit in Photoshop.
Once open, I ran one round of Shadow/Highlight by selecting the Image > Adjustments > Shadow Highlights
I then added another adjustment layer to add more Brightness and Contrast. Remember, your original image is nothing but a digital negative. It needs such post processing to fix the elements that cannot be achieved in-camera.
To give more details to the moss on the branch I manually selected the branch and overexposed it a little. This slight overexposure provides halo effect you see in the final image.
After this, I added a little bit of light to the bird’s eye. To do this, I manually selected the eye and added ten points of Brightness.
The rest of the image was left untouched as I wanted to keep it as natural as possible.
Once this was done my image was ready for a resize and sharpness adjustments as the last steps. I resized the file to my desired online posting size of 1800 pixels on the longer side. Afterward, I ran smart sharpen at 72% to get my desired file.
The process to convert file to sRGB and saving remains the same as in all case studies.
About The Bird
This passerine bird gets its name from its soft and silky plumage and the beautiful blue-gray upper body with yellow-green crown and flanks make it stand out. They are found perched on fruit trees especially mistletoe at high altitudes only on the mountains of Costa Rica and Western Panama. It is a non-migrant bird that occupies forests and shrublands.
