Just part of a bird this time...

I've been waiting for our pet brown-headed parrot to shed a well-coloured feather and on day 148 she finally obliged.



I haven't really done any macro since getting the 7D so this was a welcome change of pace. The 60mm still does an admirable job on this body, so it confirms what I always heard about the glass in that lens. I love the downy bit at the bottom, and the 60 caught it beautifully.

This was lit against a black background by a single snooted speedlite off to the object's left. There was a fair bit of colour twiddling in postprocessing to bring up the iridescence that her feathers have under natural light. It's a bit of a heavy handed edit, admittedly, but that's part of the process of matching a picture to what the photographer sees.

I didn't realize that before, but now I do. It's not 'cheating' to edit it a photo, it's like icing a cake with a certain flavour of icing in order to bring out a subtle hint in the cake itself. If it's what the baker intended, then it's 'right' regardless of the method.