another bird

[stuart wanuck]

nikon d 300 70-200 mm iso 400 500 @ 5.6

[Dan Walker]

Great detail in the eye and esp. on the feathers. The OOF wing doenst bother me too much.

Dan

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Very nice image Stuart with excellent exposure on the blacks and wonderful eye contact. I really like the crop you chose for this one. Congratulations on a fine image.

[Fabs Forns]

I like the shape of the composition, but in this case, since your BG was water or sky at infinity, closing the aperture would have given you a needed DOF for the wing without detriment to your BG. Nice soft light too and EXP right on.

[Steve Maxson]

A striking portrait, Stuart. The exposure looks to be right on with good detail in the blacks. The colors and sharpness of the head and neck are very nice and I really like the S - curve in the neck. On the other hand, I find the OOF wing to be fairly distracting in what is otherwise an excellent image.

[Arthur Morris]

I love the pose and the sharpness of the face. The o-of near wing does not bug me. I will disagree with Fabs by saying that at such close range stopping down enough (to sharpen the near-wing) would be pretty much impossibl (even if you focused half way between the eye and the bend of the near-wing.... Assuming a distance of 5 feet to the subject d-o-f at f/22 is less than one inch in front and behind the point of focus....

[David Thomasson]

Excellent! Maybe just a slight variation in the background brightness? (This was done with a selective color adjustment layer, but curves or levels or other methods would works as well.)

http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/2485/bird2ar9.jpg