America Kestrel

[chris mayne]

This male Kestrel was on his favorite hunting perch at the San Elijo Lagoon in Cardiff Ca. There was a small twig removed from lower right hand corner. Your comments and critiques are very helpful.

1DMKIII
500 4/L + 1.4ex
1/3200 f/5.6
ISO 800


www.chrismayne.net (http://www.chrismayne.net)

[Colin Driscoll]

Lovely pose and colors and an overall very pleasing shot! The bg is very noisy but easy to fix and maybe bring a bit more detail out of the shadows plus a little more sharpening.

[Peter Wallack]

The bird looks wonderful-----=----- except for the very hot white of the chin and neck. You can attempt to select the are with a tool find under Select menu FEATHER and set for 20; then go to Image-Adjust menu and find Brightness/Contrast. You may have to lower this so much it doesn't work!! NO PROBLEM. Under Image-Adjust go down to SHADOW/HIGHLIGHTS. It will take less than one minute for you to figure out the sliders and calm the highlights and make the rest of the bird richer.

[Randy Stout]

Chris

A fine looking little raptor. I like that he is at the very end of the perch, nothing blocked. Well exposed. As Colin mentioned, there is some residual noise in the BG, although the colors are very nice and complimentary to the bird.

With this situation, if you had time to do it, I might have tried a lower ISO to allow less noise, you had SS to burn. A little more DOF would have been nice as well.

Thanks for posting. Hope to see more of this beauty.

Randy

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the angle and BG. I would have gone to ISO 400 at this shutter speed. Did you run NR on the bird or is it a heavy crop? There seems to be some lack of fine details.

[Ed Cordes]

This is a striking pose with outstanding detail. The BG does have a bit of noise, but not intrusive.

[Peter Wallack]

I sent this message to Chris

I took your image to my hard drive and worked it for 10 minutes. I did the following:
1) Shadows 0/ Highlights 89
2) Gausian Blurs at 5.8 of 2 Selected areas all surrounded bird feathered by 40
3) Blur tool to touch up smoothness near tail with small blur tool
4) USM 22/3.0/0
The image is now as nice as any Kestral Image in the world.
I went to size and saw bringing it to me had changed the dpi to 300 and the inches to smaller. I changed it back to 72 dpi with longer side 9 inches.
If you e-mail me at pwallack007@comcast.net I can send you the image. I can also make it a 300 dpi of a bigger size; just let me know the longer side in inches.
Best,
Peter Wallack

[David Fletcher]

I like the angle and BG. I would have gone to ISO 400 at this shutter speed. Did you run NR on the bird or is it a heavy crop? There seems to be some lack of fine details.

Lovely bird and pose, but have the same thoughts as Axel. TFS

[Morkel Erasmus]

ditto Axel and Dave - lots of details lost and the bird is soft. a total rework might turn out to be a good picture in the end!

[Peter Wallack]

http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/picture.php?albumid=147&pictureid=1875

http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/picture.php?albumid=147&pictureid=1876

I have gone through some of the history of threads here and individuals were doing this regularly.