Winter has actually taken hold in upstate New York this year. In the last couple of weeks we have received more snow than all of last season's total. No surprise then when the forecast called for a moderate snow storm to hit throughout the day Sunday. With coffee at the ready, I grabbed the Canon 7D Mark II and went to find the birds.

This time of year I typically find Chickadees, Juncos, Titmice, Blue Jays, and Mourning Doves in abundance. Also in abundance but more difficult to get close-ups are the Northern Cardinals, Blue Jays, Nuthatches, and woodpeckers. I was a bit surprised then to find a Eastern Mockingbird land in front of my EOS 100-400MM F/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens. Admittedly, I had to do a bit of searching to identify the bird after photographing it as this is not a common bird I typically shoot.

The images here were shot handheld and the RAW images post-processed in Adobe Lightroom CC. More recently I have been using Adobe Photoshop CC more to apply luminance masks for very controlled post-processing in the highlights, shadows, and mid-tones.

The more I use Photoshop (starting with importing the image from Lightroom as a Smart Object), the more I am becoming a convert to Photoshop. The number one reason being I can make very targeted adjustments and have absolute control over how much that adjustment gets applied and even come back the next day and remove or modify the adjustment. Also, as a big Nik Software user, I have discovered that using Nik's plugins in Photoshop are applied as filters and therefore are editable...this was not something I could do in Lightroom.

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