[Joule1991]

Hello!

What you see there is a parrotlet of the forpus passerinus family.
Recently I've been photographing the many birds that roam the trees near my house, I don't have a longer lens and, frankly, I am very knew and unversed about post processing beyond adjusting the exposure slider and the color temperature in darktable. Any suggestions to improve the picture would be greatly appreciated!

ps: The photo is heavily cropped straight from the camera.
pss: I used flash.

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[chd]

Cute bird! :-) Focus looks pretty good, perhaps a touch soft, or that may be the resolution showing after cropping.


Suggestions... you said you don't have a longer lens, so I assume this was at 200mm, and you also said it's already heavily cropped. Given that, I would definitely not bother with the flash; it almost certainly won't throw that far and will only serve to startle the birds.

It's up to you, but I might be inclined to crop it even a bit further, to exclude the blurry foreground branch on the right, and also to pull attention more toward your subject; since the bird is nearly the same color as the surroundings, it may tend to get a little lost if it's not big enough in the frame. There will be a limit to what your resolution will let you do, but something to experiment with.

For processing, again it's something to experiment with and see what looks right, but maybe add a touch of exposure, a bit more contrast, and maybe a bit more whites or highlights? Not too much though. If you are working with the raw files you'll have a lot more headroom for those kinds of adjustments too.