Sunlit GBH w Dark Mangrove BG

I have been trying to get shots of subjects in sunlight with BGs in the dark and vice versa. Happy to report I’m getting both. This GBH foraged around me for a good 40 minutes in full sunlight and then walked straight in front of the dark mangroves as the Sun was going down. The scene took my breath away as I was watching it unfold.

Below are short rundowns of settings and my post processing:

ISO 200
AV ƒ/6.3
TV 1/1000

Canon 7Dii and 100-400mm ii
Focal Length 400mm
Manual Exposure / Servo / Full Frame / Back Button Focus

Processed in DPP4 and PScc

Thanks for taking the time to look. As always, comments are appreciated.

Pretty cool man. Its looking real good. The dk BG sure shows the bird real well. Nice details on the bird and a lovely pose. I like your chosen crop, but, I think a landscape look would also look good with partial reflection.

Well done

Will

This is really cool. Has a fine art look to it. The bird really pops against all the dark surrounding it.

Hi Noel,
This does have a unique feel to it with that dark BG enveloping the bird. An intriguing image.
Allen

Beautiful mood. Glad you went vertical to include the reflection. I do see that you rotated the image to straighten it out....you then forgot to crop out, or fill in, the resulting corners all around.

This is really nice Noel.
Great mood and feel to this. I am on a laptop traveling so it is hard for me to really critique properly!
If not against your ethics I would get rid of the hint of vegetation in the black BG behind the bird.
I like the crop as well.
Gail

Thank you for your thoughts and comments.

Daniel - yes...embarrassing..I did rotate it and forgot to fill in the triangles. I reworked it and filled in those triangles using content aware fill.

As most of the comments stated, I too thought it had a really cool mood or feel to it, and I thought the dark BG made it pop as John and Will said. Gail - I have no ethical conundrum cleaning up an image the way you have suggested. My goal is to learn to make and present great images, I will try that.

I'm reposting my rework with the content aware fill. I tried darkening the image a bit more. Somewhere in the process I managed to decrease the file size by a lot, and I think it affected the image quality (learning as I go here).

Good. I like more repost..more details..good more dark! Well done !

Love it. With my dark monitor problems I am wondering how it would look with the bird opened up a bit. I would definitely go to 2x3.

with love, artie