Birds at L.A. Zoo

[dalethorn]

Grackle sitting on car outside of zoo, in parking lot.  The quality here is low, but the main goal I had was to try to bring up the color on one of the images to the same brightness etc. as the other image, without changing the overall contrast and color balance.  I don't think it's going to be doable, since the main difference is in the form of highlights, rather than overall brightness on the bird's breast area.

[dalethorn]

These are *very* low rez, shot with a Pana TZ5 pocket camera from about 200 ft away, in heavy shade, cropped from ~3500 pixels wide to 1280 wide.  It's a miracle they were salvageable at all.

I'm adding these here because they were also taken at the L.A. Zoo, about 1/2 hour before the Grackle photos, and these are obviously not a caged bird.  I get a lot of wild animal images at the L.A. Zoo, which is interesting.  I suppose the hawk sees a lot of potential meals around there, apparently a squirrel in this case.

[dalethorn]

Another bird inside the zoo, but not part of the zoo.

[dalethorn]

And finally, one that *is* part of the zoo.  You can see the out-of-focus bars in the foreground.  I don't know what species this is.  Taken with Pana TZ5 at maximum (280 mm equiv.) zoom, handheld at 1/10 second.