Little Pied Cormorant - small in the frame

[Glenn Pure]

174737

Taken in early morning light at Lake Curalo, southern New South Wales - like my last post, but this one is from last June (mid-winter here) on a nice still morning. I've used about two thirds of the frame area in this shot.

As always, thank you for looking and for any comments you are kind enough to share.

Technical: Canon 80D with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM at 241mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/1000 sec, f7.1, ISO 500. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 3, crop, lighting adjustments, NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Modest NR to bird and stronger NR to background. Bird only sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian Blur) after final size reduction.

[Arthur Morris]

Looks sharp enough and I like the tones and color of the BKGR. But with the light from the back right this does not work for me at all as most of the bird is completely in the shade; did you try opening up the subject?. And while I like the strips at the top, the basic image design is flawed. The bird is too tight in the frame below and needs to be more to the right.

with love, artie

[gail bisson]

I am trying to like this but I have to agree with Artie's critique. The bird is too shaded ( too bad he didn't look towards you a bit more and that would have lit up the face) and needs to be moved to the right.
I like the bands at the top.
Would be worth a redo in PP,
Gail

[John Mack]

Interesting frame here. Small in the frame works well. The early morning light looks nice.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Another option, if it was available to do so at the time, would be to line up the subject closer to the sun behind it and go for a silhouette. I love the fine streaking in the water.

[Glenn Pure]

Many thanks Artie, Gail, John and Daniel. Will bear in mind the composition suggestions but won't rework this one given the other flaws as I think it is unrecoverable. I did open up the tones on the bird but didn't want to go much further as it would start to look unnatural, at least to my eye. No option to move positions here, unfortunately.