Little Grebes on a misty morning

[Aditya Sridhar]

Recently, I've been having a lot of fun experimenting with small-in-frame compositions, and this is one of those attempts. I wish the grebe on the left was in focus, but the light was quite low and I couldn't raise the shutter speed/stop down the aperture any further, unfortunately. I'm sure this isn't everybody's cup of tea, but I'd love to hear your thoughts and inputs!

Camera - Nikon D850
Focal Length - 700mm
Aperture - f/8
Shutter Speed - 1/640s
ISO - 4000 (!)
Handheld
Manual, Auto ISO
~50% of Full-frame

[gail bisson]

Hi Aditya,
I love the color palette, light and low POV.
Image design rocks. But...the OOF grebe on the left is a real problem.
Looking forward to your next attempt!
Gail

[David Roach]

Serene and colorful. Having the same pose works well and I don't mind the OOF bird. Might be even stronger as pano (still small in frame). TFS

[Bill Dix]

I love the idea, and the frame is really lovely except for the left bird. Colors and mood are beautiful. I wonder, if you had had the time, whether you could have tried focus stacking, with multiple frames focused on each bird.

[William Dickson]

Everything looks real good here apart from the OOF Grebe...I would remove it and come in from the LHS. Love the colours throughout. Nice work.

Will

[John Mack]

The colors here are great. Agree about getting rid of that left bird. The low angle is great.

[Robert Kimbrell]

Just a beautiful scene you have captured. The colors are amazing. I also find the bird on the left distracting.

[arash_hazeghi]

As much as I want this one to work for me it does't, the landscape is very beautiful but you might as well just crop out both grebes, they are tiny soft and hardly show any details. judging by the full frame, you cannot crop it tighter without significant IQ loss

TFS

[Aditya Sridhar]

Thanks everyone for the valuable inputs. The thought behind the image was to keep the birds small-in-frame, but I can see why some would like to see it tighter. I agree that the grebe on the left isn't ideal, but I've other shots of a single grebe that just weren't doing it for me. In any case, the grebe on the right is sharp and any sharpness issues that can be seen here are down to my processing. I'll have another go at this file and see how it turns out.

[Brian Sump]

I'll accept the artistic approach here Aditya. Super warm. While this will be hard to pass in an Avian forum, outside of that the overall canvas produces a strong emotion that is worth the tradeoff.

Id love to see a version with just the bird on right with as much periphery as you can include.

Thanks for sharing.