Bewick’s Wrens are small and move fast, often close to the ground, which makes it challenging to photograph them with a pleasing background. This photo was, in a way, assisted by the American Robins.
I was making photos of the robins and already had the camera with the long lens ready when this guy (or gal?) hopped closer and closer to me, and then left the ground, fluttering higher and higher up along a trellis until it was on a beam of our aging pergola, nicely isolated from the background:
Things were still a bit complicated though: the first problem was that the bird’s tail merged with some plant in the frame with the best overall position — but was isolated in the next frame. So I loaded the two frames into Photoshop, removed the tail merged with the plant, and cloned in the isolated tail.
The second problem was image noise: in “action mode” I had the camera set to a fixed shutter speed of 1/1000s (which isn’t even that fast for birds in motion) and the resulting ISO on this overcast morning was 6400. This led to considerable noise, of course. Thankfully, Lightroom Classic 12.3 has just been released, and it has a pretty awesome AI-Denoise which I used, on both of the frames actually, and before merging them…
Could the result be better, still? Definitely. Does it have to better? Definitely not. I have my trophy photo of a Bewick’s Wren in our own backyard, and it’s presentable enough for me to show it here. 🙂 Nemesis no more!