Say's Phoebe

[W T Lloyd]

Got this little fellow down at the beach, late afternoon today. I like the background colors contrasting with the bird and and his matching perch...
1D3 w/ 600mm and 2EX 1200mm 1/400 @ f.11 ISO 400 manual exposure
This is a crop from horizontal - developed in Lightroom, some background noise reduction done in CS4..

[Randy Stout]

WT:

I do like the complimentary colors of the background. The mass and brightness of the vertical tree draws my attention from the bird. It was the first thing I noticed about the picture. Perhaps you can darken it a bit/ lower the contrast, so it isn't such a visual magnet.

The bird is very sharp on my monitor, with nice head angle.

I might also be tempted to crop in from the left margin. However, my last post shows that I am not the most elegant cropper, so take that for what it is worth!

Cheers

Randy

[john crookes]

The subjet is great with a pleasing pose and good light on it I agree that the BG branch pulls attention away from your subjet and maybe a slight move to your left would have eliminated the branch from view without losing the angle of light too much

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the head angle and BG and agree that moving to your left would have helped with the branch. As it is, I would tone down the highlights of the BG branch.