Southern Emerald Toucanets are from the family of Emerald Toucanets and are spread across humid tropical forests in foothills and highlands.
Location
The only reliable location to photograph this bird was high up in the Andes in a little camping spot called El Color De Mi Reves in the Manizales area of Colombia.
Preparing the Scene:
Getting to the area where this bird is frequently seen early in the mornings needs a short hike of ten minutes after which one must wait for around twenty to thirty. The birds come down to feed on fruits left by the lodge owners.
I brought my tripod along with my Canon 1dx ii and 60mm f4 lens. I also brought rain gear for my camera and myself as this region is known to have high rainfall throughout the year.
Composing the Shot:
To my surprise, the bird landed just a couple of feet away from me. This coincidence completely threw me off and as I was using a very long lens anticipating a larger distance e. To get the entire bird in the frame, I had move back by twelve feet or so. The only issue with that was now I was getting soaked in the rain!
Lighting:
For this shot I was overwhelmed with the amount of natural sun light entering the scene. It caused a harsh rim light to the right of the bird. However, I used this to my advantage by underexposing the scene. Doing this made the grape shine more while the rest of the bird was darker. This dynamic created an interesting mood in the frame.
Post Processing
This is how my image looked straight out of my camera:
As always, the first plan is to take care of the raw file and process the image to get it as close as possible to what I want in my final one.
As one can see, I bumped up the exposure a little. I also fixed the Contrast and Highlights to ensure the image was not as harsh as it looked in the raw file. I then added more Shadows so to even out the dark areas.
This fixed a lot of the issues.
Next, I opened the raw file to edit in Photoshop.
Once open, I ran one round of S-shadow/Highlight by selecting > Image > Adjustments > Shadow Highlights
Now I have a flat image to work on which is the ideal setting editors want,
I then added another adjustment layer to add more Brightness and Contrast.
Add a layer of color correction: In the Adjustments panel, click the tool icon for the adjustment you want to make: For tonality and color, click Levels or Curves. For adjusting color, click Color Balance or Hue/Saturation.
The Rest of the image was left untouched as I wanted to keep the it as natural as possible.
Once this was done my image was ready for resize and sharpness as last steps. I resized the file to my desired online posting size of 1800 pixels on the longer side and then ran smart sharpen at 72% to get my desired file.
The process to convert file to sRGB and saving remains the same
About the Bird
It is one of the seven species of mountain toucanets, and there are fourteen subspecies of this bird which is widely spread from southern Mexico to southern Peru and Northern Bolivia. They are mostly green in color but the shade of their beaks and area around their eyes vary. They love to feed on a variety of fruits, and have insects only during their nesting cycle.
