As mentioned in my previous post, here are a few more photos from Ridgefield
NWR from last Wednesday:

http://www.featherphotography.com/gallery/20031217

For those of you who digiscope, read on.

For awhile now, I?ve been using Photoshop Elements II?s photomerge option to
create panoramas of scenery from multiple photographs. I?m not sure if
others here have tried merging several photos of a bird into one, but here
are my first attempts of having a go at it.

http://www.featherphotography.com/gallery/album05/Hawk_Rough_legged_0b
http://www.featherphotography.com/gallery/album05/Heron_Great_blue_01_Photom
erge


While limited to _very_ still birds, merging would seem to allow a chance to
get all of a close bird in a picture, and much higher resolution than a
single photo.

The hawk is a merge of three separate pictures, and the heron a merge of
six. The hawk photos were merged from top to bottom, and the heron photos
merged both top to bottom and side to side (3 vertical by 2 horizontal).

While the hawk was relatively simple (I had to clone stamp a small area of
the sky on the left side), the heron was much tougher. The heron moved
slightly during the photos, and the long plumes shifted enough to make
matching the photos tough (I had to carefully crop parts that didn?t match
up well). In addition, depth of field was much tougher on the heron, and
there are several areas were sharp focus and soft focus are side by side.
Lastly, although the Coolpix 880 has a setting to lock the exposure for
multiple photos (and I used it), it is less than perfect and I had to
slightly adjust several photos before the merge.


John
www.featherphotography.com