White storks and sand martins

[Juan Aragonés]

Hi all, I am back after my hollidays. Not a great thing to return to the daily routine of the office after a nice time enjoying family and birding time but one of the good things is that I can return to BPN too. I have been with very limited access to internet and I apologize my lack of participation in the past weeks. BPN has been missed a lot :)
After the hollidays I have to process a massive amount of images of one of my favourite species, the flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) and many more species because the summer has been really successfull in terms of photography so keep ready to see a lot of images of flamingoes in the next weeks :D

Well, this image is not of flamingoes but of a post-breeding concentration of white storks (Ciconia ciconia) in the marshes around Doñana. The group of storks was landing in a rice field to join a large group of white storks resting in the rice field. The out of focus spots in the backgrounf are sand martins.

As always, your comments and suggestions are highly apreciated

Juan

Nikon D300 AFS Nikkor 500VR+1,4XTC, handheld, ISO500, f9 1/1250s croped for composition to 9Mp, manual exposure

[Kiran Poonacha]

welcome back Juan, great setting here, the head on pose works well, the DOF is pretty much in control and good light, but not very sure if the OOF birds should be there.. lovely one, congrats.. waiting for more..

[Doug Brown]

Glad to see you posting again Juan! I like the L shape of the birds but for me there's too much overlap between birds. The OOF Sand Martins are a little distracting. Look forward to your Flamingo images!

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Great to see you posting again Juan. I agree with Doug about the OOF martins but love the feeling of motion you captured in this image.

[Harshad Barve]

Grand settings here , loved L shape , agreed with Doug & Kiran about OOF sand martins
TFS

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Hi Juan,
Good to have you back. I like the composition. It would have been great if there would have been a bit more separation between the birds. Look forward to more.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Aidan Briggs]

Nice exposure control, and composition. Great DOF too. IMO the sand martins aren't adding much.

Looking forward to more!

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great light and amazing to see so many storks together. I think it would also work without the OOF birds but would remove the one in the upper right. It seems a little lost for my taste.

[Juan Aragonés]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. I decided to keep the out of focus birds because I think that they add a sensation of deep (I think that the overlapping storks increases the feeling of deep compared to an image with no overlaping birds). I have a lot of images from this series and I will look for one with no sand martins and less overlapping between the storks and will try to compare with this one.

It is great for me to hear different opinions and points of view about this image and I apreciate a lot :)