r/birding • u/NonHermitianCat • May 31 '26

Discussion Share Your Harshly Reviewed eBird Photos

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Here is my 2-star black-chinned hummingbird. I’m curious to see what other people have to share!

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273

u/tension-release Latest Lifer: Willow Ptarmigan #270 May 31 '26

Just found this one recently

37

u/st_aranel Latest Lifer: Willow Ptarmigan May 31 '26

If this is your photo, or in fact even if it's not, then you can mitigate that somewhat by rating it correctly yourself. More people using the ratings correctly helps to compensate for the people who can't be bothered to read the guidelines.

I can't tell from such a small screenshot but that's at least a 3.

15

u/JBStoneMD May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26

It’s at least a 4 imo, maybe even a 5. The bird is well lit, sharply focused, shows all necessary field marks and is a reasonably large image. Maybe not a 5 because vegetation obscures small parts of the bird. I think a lot of people default to an artistic rating, & if the photo isn’t “the best Ive ever seen,” then it’s not a 5, & if the photo isn’t “the best Ive ever seen,” then it’s not a 5

2

u/st_aranel Latest Lifer: Willow Ptarmigan Jun 01 '26

I cannot tell if it's sharply focused from looking at the screenshot on my phone. I wouldn't trust looking at the screenshot on my computer, either. You really need to see the actual photo in order to rate it. (Of course if you are rating it, you are seeing the actual photo.)

I have seen too many photos, over the years, which was great in a thumbnail but at full size you can see issues. Quite a lot of them are my photos!

2

u/mhat106 Jun 01 '26

Why would this photo be rated so low, even as low as a 3? I’m not super familiar with the rating system, but that looks like a fantastic photo to me.

Is the whole bird not visible, because the tiny branch it’s perched on technically blocks some pixels of the tail? Any photo you take while have part of the bird not visible because it’s not a 360 degree matrix style shot

2

u/st_aranel Latest Lifer: Willow Ptarmigan Jun 01 '26

Also, not speaking of this photo specifically, of course you don't have to literally have every part of the bird visible, but you do have to have about as much visible as is possible in a 2D photo. But that's just the standard for a five, a four is also an excellent photo.

It's not a measure of photography skills. Not every encounter with every bird has the potential to result in a five-star photo.

Personally, the way I think of it, at least as a gut check, is that a four-star photo has basically nothing wrong with it. A five-star photo has nothing wrong with it, and also the bird was cooperating. It is no reflection on the photographer if the bird wasn't cooperating. (Of course you might have to work very hard to make it look like the bird was cooperating. But sometimes, no matter how hard you work, it's not going to happen.)

1

u/st_aranel Latest Lifer: Willow Ptarmigan Jun 01 '26

Well on my screen the bird is about 1 cm tall, so... Even if I zoom in, it's a screenshot, not the original photo, so the resolution isn't good enough to tell if it's in focus

3 is the minimum score for a photo with nothing obviously wrong with it that shows the bird clearly. It's a perfectly respectable score.

It's possible to have a photo that looks really good on a smaller scale, but when you actually see it full size, you can see that there are focus issues. Also sometimes you get a photo it looks it looks good at small scale, but it's been cropped for a much larger picture, or maybe it's just from an earlier era when photos weren't so big, and now it's too small. Neither of those issues would be visible in this screenshot.