Return of the Nuthatch

My friend, the nuthatch, returned again after something of a hiatus. (Actually, I don't think he ever left. We stopped leaving seeds out on our porch for a while, and when we started up again, the squirrels thought that we were leaving out a buffet for them. It was quite a while before we started seeing birds again.) The nuthatch is a difficult bird to capture with your camera. We have dubbed it the 'five second' bird, because five seconds is pretty much all that you have to take the shot. In five seconds, the bird has landed, picked up a seed, and flown away, so -- if you're not ready, you've missed it. The conditions under which this shot was taken was not really the best. As we begin to move into the winter months, the late afternoon lighting from the sun gave me shutter speeds lower than 1/10 sec. at ISO-100 and 0 exposure. To compensate, I bumped my ISOs up to ISO-200, and I turned my exposure down to -1.7. This gave me an exposure time of 1/15 sec., and a rather dark image. Sending the file through Photomatix, the image brightened up quite a bit (the program generates a darker and lighter file when you process a single image file). I also did some crop and touch up work in Aftershot Pro. So, overall, I was glad to see the nuthatch landing on my porch again.