Bird on a Stick

[Mike Tracy]

Female Snail Kite taken from my boat this morning.

MKIII, EF500 @ 1.4x, 1/1250, f/6.3, ISO 800, E.C. +1, hand held, close to full frame

[Randy Stout]

Mike:

Heck of a stick. She is lovely, with great talons, very elegant looking. Nice sharpness,exposure.

The only two minor points I might consider
1) remove the short stub of stick that hits tail
2) tone down brightness of background slightly

Really nice.

Randy

[Sid Garige]

Excellent job Mike. We dont often see such a great background for this species.

[Chris van Rooyen]

Great posture and beautiful background!. I agree with Randy's suggestions, and possibly another round of NR on the background?

[Dave Barnes]

Very well exposed with good feather and eye detail. Ditto Randy and Chris.

[Mike Tracy]

Thank you for the comments and suggestions.

I noticed the little "nub" from the beginning but left it as I usually don't add / remove elements. Not sure how effective my clone job was for that matter.

Reduced the brightness a tad. For future reference what manner is most effective ?

[Randy Stout]

Mike:

I generally use NX2 for my post work. If the subject is different enough from the background, I can use what they call a control point to select the background and exclude the subject, and adjust brightness with that.

If the subject and image are closer in brightness, than I will use the lasso tool to exclude the subject and then adjust the brightness of the rest of the image. Sometimes a combination of both.

I just love the elegant pose of this bird. The talons/feet are great.

Randy

[Jay Gould]

Mike, I like it - both the OP and and the repost!

Randy, is NX2 limited to Nikon? Always looking at new programs.

Cheers, Jay

[Stu Bowie]

Mike, this is pin, pin sharp. Lovely pose, good detail, and just love the show of those talons. I agree to maybe tone down the BG a tad.

[Randy Stout]

Jay:

NX2 can process jpegs, tiffs, and NEFs (Nikons Raw file). Some of the features were handled by NiK, so it has some cool stuff. It is slow, a memory hog, and a bit of a challenge at times with the interface, but for Nikon shooters, it gives the best raw conversion of their files.

Randy

[Kiran Poonacha]

Lovely Image... congrats..

the cloneing is good in the repost, but the Image looks too soft.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the setting, eye contact and BG. The repost looks better but the bird is not as sharp as in the original post. On my monitor the image looks even better if you take the midtone slider in Levels to 0.92 or so.

[Diane Chenault]

Hi Mike,

She looks like an elegant sharp lady here

[Ramon M. Casares]

One of the most wonderfull and elegant images of these bird's I've seen lately. Big congratulations, the pose, perch, BG, light, colors, detail, exposure and comp are amazing.

[Tony House]

What a majestic pose, regal looking infact..

Nice work.
Tony