Theme: Preening Swan portrait

[Gerald Kelberg]

I was photographing more distant ducks and geese at a favourite hide over the weekend and this beautiful Mute Swan chose to carry out her preening just a few meters in front - in the shade of the hide. I couldn't resist!

I've chosen this as a "portrait" theme because I want a portrait to be more than simply a head shot - to me this conveys the sensuous elegance of the swan.

Getting the whites right hasn't been so easy, but I think this is close enough to how I want them. How am I doing?

Canon EOS 1DX, EF 200-400 with 2x converter @ 428mm - It was configured for shooting at 800mm!
1/250 sec @ f/10, ISO 800
DPP4 for conversion; into PS5 for levels and curves adjustments, brushed on low level of Tonal Contrast from ColorEfex Pro

Thanks for your comments and suggestions.

Gerald

[William Dickson]

Lovely portrait Gerald. I love the brightness and details on the neck feathers and the way the bill is tucked in. It makes a nice portrait shot. The body of the swan is a wee bit too bright for my liking, I would have liked to see more feather detail here.

Overall a lovely image and thanks for sharing

[Kirk Benson]

This is quite lovely IMO Gerald... some might feel that the eye is too centered, but I don't know how you could compose this portrait any better... I like it a lot.
On first glance I thought the BG whites were a bit too bright, but after looking at it for awhile... the brighter BG allows the detail in the head and neck feathers to be the focal point of the image and draws my eye where it needs to be. Well done.
My only suggestion is to tone down the whites in the back feathers just a bit to separate them a tad more from the BG.
Super image, very well done and a pleasure to see.

[arash_hazeghi]

Great preening pose, you had nice soft light. The exposure is certainly good and accurate, you may want to extract just a tad more detail in the whites. My wish is that his head (eye) was perfectly parallel to the back of the camera

TFS

[Daniel Cadieux]

Well seen Gerald, I like this one as presented. Well balanced composition, appealing whites on the subject and background. I like that you kept the WB on the cool side of things in this case. Perhaps a touch more saturation for the bill.

[Lorant Voros]

I like it very much as it is. Well exposed and composed image and nice details.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Gerald, lovely preening pose, and you certainly nailed the exposure and whites. I do like the darker areas in the BG, it gives the image depth. Im fine with the overall placement of the swan. Well captured.

[Gerald Kelberg]

Thanks for all the kind words and suggestions.
Arash - I think the way the eye is set on these birds, it would be difficult to get the eye parallel and the head. Happily, I do have a few variations, so I'll check through and see if there are any better shots. I'll see if I can get some more detail out of those whites!

Regards, Gerald