Yellow-eyed Canary

Cannot decide if the background is obtrusive or not.
Canon 6D2, 75-200 +1.4 extender; F4; ISO 640; 1/500
Cropping and adjustments in Lightroom.

Any advice welcomed.

Hi Rob, Thanks for sharing. The bird is nice, the head angle is good, the subject is sharp, and the exposure looks fine. The large perch is less than ideal. Several things about the image look odd to me. The perch looks as if it were ceramic rather than wood. And the background, especially in front of the bird, looks very strange; is that how it came out of camera or have you already worked on it?

with love, artie

Hello Artie,

Thanks for the reply.

The bird is sitting on the edge of a concrete drinking trough for animals. It is located underneath a tree with the main afternoon light coming from the right.
The blue on the left is from the water, The strange background is formed by the leaves and branches of the tree tis light coming through at places.
The brown/grey bottom left is concrete.
The photo is as shot and my opinion is that the background is not very attractive - but that is how the bird posed.

Kind Regards,
Rob

Robert, I feel there is something not quite right with processing. The bird looks as if it is in focus yet the detail seems to be very slightly softened. I am in agreement with Artie about the points he mentioned also. Have you applied a noise reduction technique of any knd? (Perhaps too much???)
I would suggest reducing the luminosity and possibly a little saturation in the yellow on the head & neck.

Looks like you sharpened the head of the bird too much. The pose on the bird is nice.

Revisiting this one I must say that the background is obtrusive. I tried running a 65-pixel Gaussian Blur on the whole image and then painting it in where needed with a Hide-All (Inverse of Black) Layer Mask but distracting stuff is too lose to the bird ...

with love, artie