For the birds

[plonq]

atara and I had just been talking about the sorry state of the water in our birdbath - no sign of mosquitoes breeding in it yet, but the water is abit on the brown and slimy side - when a bird happened by who apparently did not share our concern.



I had just enough time to turn and take this shot before the bird launched itself into the air again. I was actually in the middle of experimenting with a few camera settings, and I'd just locked the shutter speed at 1/1000 when this scene presented itself. While I like the "frozen in time" effect of the high speed, the camera chose an unfortunately high ISO for the shot and I wound up with a bit more digital noise than I'd like. I managed to reduce that a bit, at the expense of some detail.

I might do a bit of digital trickery on this one later to see if I can lighten up the bird's face a bit without blowing out the rest of the picture.