Grey Crowned Crane

The Grey Crowned Crane was a much sought after bird for me. I finally managed to get close enough for a portrait photo on my last trip to Tanzania's Serengeti. A pair were feeding early morning and allowed our safari vehicle to follow them for long enough to take a range of photos.
Equipment:
Canon EOS 40D
Canon EOS 400mm DO f4 + 1.4x
1/640th @ f7
ISO 400 (my 'standard')
Crop: The original format was landscape so I just cropped to change it to portrait format, with just a little crop in terms of height.

Beautiful portrait of this GCC Phil. There's some clipping of the whites in ACR, nothing major. Lovely sharpness and bokeh from that lens too. Thanks for sharing.

they truly are stunning birds Phil - too bad that there aren't many left roaming wild in South Africa.

lovely portrait here with all the colours (except the hot whites) spot on and details super.

Pretty nice portrait with a pleasing composition. If it were mine I would try and bring more detail out of the blacks. I would also tone down the feathers on the neck as they seem a bit bright to me. I wish for more detail in the whites.

I like the Comp, the crown, eye contact, shapness and BG.
I would tone down the white a little bit.

what a cool crown ,
lovely compo , sharpness and BG , hot whites mentioned
TFS

Thanks guys. Working on blacks and whites is already on my Photoshop technique learning list. That will be next up when I get some time to play around with Photoshop. I am sure that would tweak this image nicely.

Hi Phil, I like the comp,and pose, and good detail and colours on the head. I would be tempted to give this a touch of sharpening.

Thanks Stuart. I am just about to download some new sharpening software and will try it out over the next few weeks to see if I can get mproved results.