First one to blink buys beer

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

This is the same juvenile red-tailed hawk that I posted yesterday.

40d; 300 f/4L non-IS; 1.4x; iso 400; 1/640; f/11; no flash; some USM applied; some curves work

Hopefully I have done a little better job w.r.t sharpness and tones than yesterday.

Does it bother you that the eyes are not level? It doesn't bother me. I guess the white feather is a little distracting.

All critiques welcome and appreciated.

[Steve Canuel]

Great head-on stare. Clean, crisp image. A slight boost in contrast might be beneficial. Eyes don't bother me but I may be in the minority on that one.

[Mital Patel]

dear kaustubh. this is again a rocking shot. but i found some cast on both of your images. i go with steve.

dont know the beahvior of the hawk but as he stare at you it seems he knows what you're doing and it might be possible that after taking such shots if you move to your left could make hawk to turn to you and that could've made a full light on both the eyes.

just a thought.

[Randy Stout]

Kaustubh:

Lovely colors and detail in feathers. The light angle is really the issue here, IMO. Mital has a point about moving, and I would have thought moving to your right would have made the bird swivel his head more into the light, but the breast would still be darker, unless he turned his whole body. I think you would be able to even out the illumination a bit with shadow recovery.

Ultimately, the light will limit the success of this image, but some of the details are really fine.

Randy

[Mital Patel]

little correction to my written statement about direction.
Randy already corrected Kaustubh to move to your right instead left.

as well spreaded so many good post to follow on mistakes in typing are common than clicking ;)

[Randy Stout]

Kaustubh:

A quick pass at what I was mentioning. It can't overcome the lighting issue, but does even it out a bit. I brought up the shadow areas on the face and breast, and actually lowered the brightness of the left side of the face a bit.
It still has a bit of a color cast, but I don't know what this guy looks like, so left it alone.

Just something to consider.

Randy

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Randy, I liked the repost. I will attempt something similar on my master file. will look into the cast too. picture-style, color tone, white-balance....all three affect the colors. So I always struggle with whats the best combination. Depends a lot on the situation too. I do it outside in raw conversion process...but I still find it pretty time consuming to get the right color.

And when I go into photoshop elements and play around with colors, I dont end up doing a good job always :-) most times I abort the mission after some time :-)

Thx everyone
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[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the stare-down, details and composition. While I like Randy's idea to brighten the part that is not sunlit, the bird's right eye has a color cast now and I find the sky too bright.