Common Redpoll

[Raymond Lee]

The bird posed nicely for me briefly and calling her mate while perching out in the open next to a viewing platform in the park. The light was a bit lower than what I would have liked, so a higher ISO and a lower shutterspeed, shot handheld.
110050
Whitemud Park, Edmonton, AB, Canada
Canon EOS 7D | EF 400mm f/5.6L | Manual Exposure, 1/400 sec., f/5.6, ISO 1000

Thanks for all C&C, have a great week!

Raymond

[Satish Ranadive]

Marvelous image beautiful bird with nice composition. Bright lights on right side distract attention however adds to the beauty of image.

[Grace Scalzo]

I love how the light is falling on her head and the calling pose is sweet too. I would sharpen her head a bit more and also recompose to get rid of the brightness on the right side. I wouldn't have expected such a heavy perch to work with a small bird, but it does, perhaps because it holds some interest of its own and also there are no broken parts showing.

[Randy Stout]

Ray:

The bird is lovely, just a bit more sharpening on the face as Grace mentioned. The bright area to the right is a bit over powering. You could approach that issue by cropping in from the right a bit, toning down the area with a luminosity layer and multiply blend mode or clone stamping at low opacity. Even a combo of these techs would work well I suspect.

Cheers

Randy

[jack williamson]

Good advice by all above, I really like this little bird and the calling pose.

Jack

[Raymond Lee]

Good advice by everyone above, especially Randy's. Here's the re-post:

110097

Rather than Luminosity layer, I did two Multiply layer masks and one Linear Burn layer mask. As for the face, I cut down the noise reduction a little bit and I used Nik ColorEfex's Detail Extractor and made it a layer mask. Hope the re-post is better.

Really good advice here. Many thanks!

Raymond