PILEATED WOODPECKERS--
and a little software magic

This critter and its pal were doing their version of a Maypole dance around a pine tree just outside my computer room window one recent morning.

I was enthralled because you do not often see them this close to the house; and a pair of them to boot.  Soon after it occurred to my aging brain I should be doing some photography I remembered my cameras were in the car.  By the time I achieved that quiet retrieval process one of the birds had moved off to another nearby tree in its search for breakfast.

This photo was done with a Canon 70-200 mm f/2.8 L lens through two panes of window glass with the morning sun refracting its way through the window's scattered condensation and assorted other defects in and on the glass.

I selected the clearest, visual track through the glass and pushed the camera gently against the window.  This with the long lens, a fairly close (manually) focused distance and fairly wide aperture dramatically reduced the depth of field and, consequently, threw the glass imperfections out of focus.

Regardless, shooting through inexpensive window glass, even with an expensive, high-quality lens, still causes loss of image sharpness.  That was remedied slightly with Photoshop Elements' sharpness filter.  Photoshop also applied a little boost to the color saturation to amplify the marvelous red in the bird's comb and bring up the subtle yellow around the eye.

Here is the original, un-retouched image.  As you can plainly see it suffers a strong loss of contrast because of shooting through the glass  which, itself, is being punished by the early morning sun light.

Playing with levels and contrast in the software also dramatically overcame the muddy gray effect caused by the lighting and out-of-focus glass imperfections.

The light gray semi circle on the side of the bird's back is an artifact of condensation being refracted by the sunlight and thrown out of focus by the shallow depth of field.

The little photo is pretty much what you can expect with a snapshot under these conditions without sufficient lens quality to produce a fairly sharp picture, cropped from a very small area of image--then treated to the magic of editing software.