Critique some of my Work Please

[TimothyGriesel]

Hi guys

Please critique some of my work. Thank you




Title: Caught in Flight
Location: Kruger National Park
Description of Scene: Sitting at lake panic bird hide offers you agreat opportunity to capture images of the kingfishers. I sat and waiting forthis bird to dive and come out of the water, camera ready and attempting tocapture this image, finally capturing after quite a few attempts. Taken middayon quite a warm sunny day.
Date: 2013-06-12
Exposure Settings: Manual
F/5.6
1/400 sec
ISO 100
Focal Length: 400mm
Camera Used: Canon 550D
Lens Used: Canon 100-400mm L IS USM
Common Name: Pied Kingfisher
Scientific Name: Ceryle rudis

Post processing, processed in photoshop and lightroom, burning the background a little (it was dark in the original image anyway) and converting to black and white.

[Morkel Erasmus]

Good to see you posting here, Timbo.
Do make a point to head over to the "introduct yourself" thread and tell folks more about yourself and your photography.
(see here: http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...riends-and-Fun)

Also try and critique on the work of others - it's give and take here. I'll let some of the avian mods and regular avian posters tackle this one before giving my 2c

[TimothyGriesel]

Thank you Morkel :) I think this will help my photgraphy grow quite a lot and I will try get involved in critiques others images too. But it would from an amateurs position :)

[MohsenVahedipour]

Great subject for start. I like the flight pose & composition works for me. The subject very well stands against the dark BG. I do wish to see more details in both blacks & whites. You can easily set the ISO to 800 and even more without no concern to gain more shutter speed that is critical for BIF photography. The final thing that I can mention is about your signature that is so close to the subject that it can distract the viewers eyes from main subject. I'm looking forward to your next photo.

Cheers

[arash_hazeghi]

welcome Tim,

nice that you got a KF in flight, not an easy subject. I like the wing position, but the image is a bit soft and lacking in details, your shutter speed was too low for a KF in flight. you need at least 1/2500 or ideally 1/3200 sec to get him sharp. Increasing ISO was the key here to get the shutter speed right. (we don't use ISO 100 for bird photography)

The B&W conversion doesn't really work for this image, and the darker plumage and the beak get a bit lost in the black BG

TFS

[Tiago Caravana]

Composition and wing position are perfect! It's really a shame that you didn't have a higher speed shutter to frezze the bird. Go for me I almost never shot birds at less than ISO400