The Stalk

[john crookes]

One of the small Piping Plover Chicks stalking some prey item

Nikon D3
600mm F4
1.7 EXT
F 9.5
ISO 280
1/750th

[Aidan Briggs]

Like the pose and comp. I would like to see a catchlight though, and some of the whites look hot. There also seems to be a red cast

[Ramon M. Casares]

I would only suggest to ad a catchlight, the rest looks great IMO, comp, pose, ambient, BG, detail, light, amazing! Congratulations!

[john crookes]

For some reason these plover chicks do not always show a catch light from over 400 photos taken i can count on my hand how many have a catchlight.

It has to be an almost perfect perpendicular photo with the chicks eyes wide open.
On some I even used flash fill and still did not catch a light in the eyes of these chicks

Go Figure

[Paul Marcellini]

Hmm, interesting on the catchlight. I love this, I would only fade/clone out the lump behind it.

[Lorant Voros]

It works for me as it is. I love the action on this photo and the nice light makes it very sweet as well. Very nice image.

[Arthur Morris]

Fabulous job of focusing to create a great COMP. There were lots of hot pixels; I reduced the yellow SAT 44 points and this yielded a fine histogram. The original had a huge red/yellow cast. There was one big dust spot to our left of the bird and another below that one. I did some serious BKGR and FORGR de-lumping and then ran a 5 pixel Gaussian blur on the FORGR followed by a 70% Linear Burn on the highlights.

[Arthur Morris]

And here is a somewhat warmer version....