Belted Kingfisher.

[Karl Egressy]

I kind of like the pose of this guy.
Thanks for looking.

Canon 1D MIV
Canon 500 f4.0 L IS +1.4x
ISO 800
f 7.1
1/640 s
HH

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Karl,

Nice pose for sure! Great perch, head angle and background.

I've got to say, though, that the focus seems to be off quite a bit. I see the focus point on the tail/wing, causing the head to appear a bit soft on my monitor.

Miguel

[Satish Ranadive]

Beautiful image.Very nice pose,perch,BG and composition.
Do agree with Miguel about softness of head.

Regards,
Satish.

[Jeannean Ryman]

Love the pose and perch. It's also nice to see these guys out from a tangle of branches! Agree with the above about the head. Nice alert feel to this.

[Karl Egressy]

Thank you Miguel, Satish and Jeannean.
Here is the original shot showing the active focal point.
The combo was also fine tuned by using FoCal.
There are a few possible reasons why the head looks less sharp than the tail.
One obvious one is the difference in the texture of the feathers.
Wing feathers or the like, especially the edges, always look sharper.
In fact I usually undo the sharpening on the edges of the wing feathers.
I'll check the fine tuning soon just in case, thanks.

[Karl Egressy]

The next frame. The active focus point is on the eye and the fully processed image is just the same; tail looks sharper.

[Raymond Lee]

Beautiful perch shot! They are not easy to get close, at least in my area. Anyway, before reading all the comments, I also thought the head is not quite focused. The shoulder and the tail, on the other hand, look focused and sharp to me. I look forward to your fine-tuning.

[vishaljadhav]

Interesting pose captured here, the colours look nice and the BG is perfect

What the monitor shows is the tail in focus more, just may be a camera glitch for the time being showing a error focus point.

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Karl, I'm not positive about this, but if you were shooting in servo mode with expansion on then the focus point showed may not be the active one. Someone who is more familiar with canon cameras and browse browser pro may be able to chime in.