Black Kite in flight

[Luis Patacao]

This was a good day, and for my content/sadness i saw a live fight between two black kite. One was on the other end of the lake and this guy kept bugging him, the sad part was that i was unable to successfully photograph the fight due to its short duration and distance.

This was after one of the black kite fishing dives.

https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2936/14001223518_e3b31190f5_b.jpg (https://www.flickr.com/photos/patacao/14001223518/)
Milhafre Preto (https://www.flickr.com/photos/patacao/14001223518/) por Patacão (https://www.flickr.com/people/patacao/), no Flickr

What are your thoughts on this one, is it small in the frame? And The IQ? (looks good to me but not excellent)

Nikon D7000 + Sigma at 500mm. Cropped(about 30%) and basic adjustments applied (sharpening, denoise and saturation).

[Diane Miller]

The world is pretty hard for animals. Too bad about the fight -- I hope both survived.

It's nice to see this capture with a fish! Is the crop 30% reduction to the original or 30% of the area of the original??

I also shoot many that are smaller in the frame than I'd like. With only sky, there isn't much to help out a small in the frame image. And this one may be suffering from too much crop, but it's not easy to be sure from the small JPEGs seen here. Final IQ depends a lot on the processing as well as on the sharpness and tonal range of the starting capture. Can you tell us what the processing was (in general)?

[Luis Patacao]

The world is pretty hard for animals. Too bad about the fight -- I hope both survived.

It's nice to see this capture with a fish! Is the crop 30% reduction to the original or 30% of the area of the original??

I also shoot many that are smaller in the frame than I'd like. With only sky, there isn't much to help out a small in the frame image. And this one may be suffering from too much crop, but it's not easy to be sure from the small JPEGs seen here. Final IQ depends a lot on the processing as well as on the sharpness and tonal range of the starting capture. Can you tell us what the processing was (in general)?

Hi Diane, the crop is a 30% reduction of the original. The processing was basiclly crop in LR, some fill light then exported to PS, applied sharpening, saturation and thats it.

The actual size of the Kite in the blue bakground, does it seems small or acceptable?

[Diane Miller]

I think that would be a different choice for different people. For me, with a plain BG, I want the subject to be larger. Just a little context would make a smaller subject more justified -- but that's just my take.

And it all comes down to the image quality -- if it doesn't really hold up to more cropping, then it's fine as it is. (How's that for moral relativity?)