Red-bellied Woodpecker with palm seed

[Juan Tolentino]

This image was taken at my local lake in Miami Florida with the Nikon D750 Handheld and AF-S Nikkor 200-500mm 1-5.6E ED VR
ISO 1600
f5.6
1/500s
500mm
Manual Mode
LR for white balance and usual. PS for sharpening. Neat Image noise reduction.
Crop Approx. 15%


All C & C's will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for looking

JT

[Matthew Jones]

Very cool Juan, great bird, super detail and the composition works well for me.

[keith mitchell]

Beautiful natural feather detail and colour and all nice and sharp,think I might try and loose a bit off the right as the tree does dominate a little bit but that apart great shot.

Keith.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Good IQ on the face. Beautiful BG for the most part - you could blend out the brighter spots at the bottom. I too find the tree rather dominant, perhaps because of how so much of it is falling out of dof. The food item perfectly placed in the bill is neat!

[Mike Hitchen]

A great shot. Really sharp and the colours make it really stand out.
As with Keith and Daniewl I would try losing a bit of the trunk, maybe extending the background to the left if needed to maintain the format.

[Juan Tolentino]

Thank you for the comments and suggestions guys...Please see repost and let me know what you think...

[keith mitchell]

Juan I like it better this way ,might even loose a little from the left now but it's a shame to loose much of that beautiful bg. Really is a cracker of a bird and very well photographed.

Keith.

[John Whaley]

Beautiful IQ with tack focus and feather detail. Great shot. I don't know if you had room in the original but I would like to see how it would look if you changed the level to make the tree more vertical.

[Isaac Grant]

I agree with what John says. Took the liberty of doing a quick workup of it. Did not touch the bird at all. Cropped so the tree was vertical. Added some canvas and lowered the contrast of the background just a bit. I think this type of crop fixes the problem with too much of the tree showing. Thoughts.

[Juan Tolentino]

I like it!. I thought about it and even rotated it, but I wasn't comfortable adding canvas...good that I learned a couple of things last few days...Thank you for taking the time to improve the image and thank you all for commenting.

[Isaac Grant]

Juan in this case I did not even add canvas. I will describe the steps I took. Imported your picture in PS. Went to the crop icon, went on top of the picture and rotated it until the tress was somewhat straight. When you rotate the image there are lots of white/blank areas to square the image off. I selected a square crop and adjusted the size that I wanted. Then on the top of the page you will see a box that you need to check for content aware. Make sure you check that box. PS did the rest really. Filled it in almost perfectly from there. Just had to clean up a bit from the tree and that was about it. Probably took 1 minute.

Should you want to add canvas it really is just as easy. Just go to IMAGE, CANVAS SIZE. Then adjust the width and height how you want to and then anchor the opposite side of where you want to add canvas. So if you want to add canvas on the left side of the shot then anchor the right side. Hit the top right, middle and bottom right arrows and then hit OK. You can then go back and use a content aware fill to fill in the area. You can select the area that you want to fill in many ways. Usually I use the rectangular function and the use a content aware fill to blend.

Hope that helps.

[keith mitchell]

Juan it's been interesting reading the threads on your image and I do like what Isaac as done,but must admit I do like the hang back pose of your original post better especially with your repost.

Keith.

[Juan Tolentino]

Thank you for the opinions and teachings guys, I really appreciated.