Birding in the Backyard

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It’s been fun to spend some time hanging out with the birds in my own backyard. Blondie the Palm Warbler is back, and this Orange-Crowned Warbler has become a regular also. He’s a big fan of my honeysuckle vine.

Orange Crowned Warbler
Orange Crowned Warbler

I sat photographing the birds on on a dead tree branch in my backyard. First Papa Cardinal hopped up, followed a second later by Mama Cardinal. They didn’t stay long enough to photograph them together, but when I saw these positions and head angles, I couldn’t resist doing a composition in Photoshop. Wow! The newer versions of Photoshop have made simple compositions so easy. You pick you two photos in Lightroom, select Merge to Panorama in Photoshop, and it auto-aligns and auto-adjusts the tones to match the two images. It even offered to auto-fill any holes using Content-Aware Fill. A few years ago this composite would have taken some hand-editing in Photoshop, but today all I had to do was hit Save!

Northern Cardinal Pair
Northern Cardinal Pair

This Brown Thrasher required no such editing in Photoshop. He wants to clarify that he selected his own pleasing composition next to the red hummingbird finial!

Brown Thrasher
Brown Thrasher

My last bird of the morning was one of my Painted Bunting, who dared me to write a blog post without including a photo of my favorite wintering birds. Well, one of my favorites. The American Goldfinches are my other favorites, and they hadn’t been showing up to pose for the camera much this winter. Hopefully that’ll change in 2021!

Painted Bunting
Painted Bunting