I realised that I could’ve done better with yesterday’s images. The nuthatch could be cropped differently to make use of the full width of the image and get rid of some of the excess on top. And while I was processing it, I decided to add some more canvas for good measure so now there’s a bit more space in front of the bird than in the original (crop dimensions 1:2). And by the way, it’s my all-time favourite bird image – regardless of the method I used for achieving the end result!
And the picture with two birds, it was definitely too tight on the left but I couldn’t leave the ugly tree trunk in there either. But with such an even background otherwise, no problem to replace the tree trunk with more yellow. I would’ve like to expand it even more, but I noticed that the pixels started ”streaking” – there was some noise from the high ISO and it doesn’t quite work with extreme canvas expansions! So I settled with a 4:3 crop instead.
And having spoken about the sunny conditions I don’t like, here’s another nuthatch to illustrate the issue. The background isn’t nearly as bad as it could be though, I deleted everything worse… That pose though, it’s classic nuthatch!