White Pelican

[Vaughn Stamm]

172664
White Pelican taken this past May at a local wetland preserve near me where hundreds stopover during their migration.
Shot with Nikon d7100, Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary lens at 250mm; 1/2500, 5.6, 280 (auto-ISO); hand-held. Cropped slightly and mild adjustments in PhotoScape Pro. Comments and critique welcomed.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Vaughn, I'm not familiar with Photoscape software. I suspect the image is better than presented, the bird is a little bit "choked" with colour and the detail in the feathers is not quite there. Ideally the bid would have been just a tad more to the right so the tail was clear of the trees.
Strongly recommend Photoshop CC or if you prefer you could buy Photoshop Elements.
If you used Auto ISO did you override it to overexpose? I suspect not, this would have resulted in an underexposed bird, this may help explain the heavy colours.

[Vaughn Stamm]

Thanks for the comments Jonathan. Here is the original with no crop and no changes made to the image. I do understand the comment regarding framing the subject so as to not clip the tail with the trees. I did not override auto ISO from what I recall. When you say "heavy colours" what do you mean? Too saturated? (I would have to check but it is possible that I had the in camera processing set to VIVID.172674

[Jonathan Ashton]

Vaughn I meant that ideally the tail should have been clear of the trees, i.e. blue sky around it. Yes original looks a little saturated, repost looks considerably better, it is a different size crop (is this the full frame?), perhaps the first image was also a very big crop - this will decrease the quality of the presented image. Could be your downsizing for web sized image regime is not ideal.