Sulphur-crested Cockatoo coming in for last drinks

[Glenn Pure]

A shot from a few evenings ago at my local dam. The sun was just about gone and I was about to leave when this bird turned up and I grabbed a couple of shots as it came in to land. I've rotated the frame to fix the horizon. Crop is about half the frame area. These birds do have a strong yellow tint under their wings in case you are wondering but the rest is the late afternoon light which I have toned down quite a lot in processing. Oh, I've added a bit of surface blur to the background too. Unusually, this bird's feathers are near pristine and undamaged. These cockatoos are noisy, highly intelligent and mischievous. They are also very common.

Capture details: Canon 80D with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/1250 sec, f6.3, ISO 1600. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 3, crop, lighting adjustments, default NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Very light NR applied to bird and stronger NR to background. Sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian blur) after final size reduction.

[William Dickson]

Lovely light you got here Glenn. I like the yellow tint on the wings, after all it was sunset and the light on the whites show this well. Great flight pose and a nice POV.

Will

[Alex Becker]

Nice incoming pose with a good wing position. Details and light are both nice and I like the orange/red / blue contrast in the BG. I guess it would have been nice to have the face in more of the light but very nice as is. TFS

[Mike Poole]

Great pose and wonderful light Glenn. Obviously I don't know the location at all, but if they are possible to predict with their flight paths, then next time I'd be tempted to stand further over to your right so the sun lights up the face a little better.

However, if its a large lake with no way of knowing where they come in, then I'd say you've done about as well as you could with this shot.

Mike

[Glenn Pure]

Thanks Will, Alex and Mike. I appreciate your views on this.

Obviously I don't know the location at all, but if they are possible to predict with their flight paths, then next time I'd be tempted to stand further over to your right so the sun lights up the face a little better.

They are fairly unpredictable Mike but I usually locate myself based on some hope that a bird will come in from the 'right' direction and land roughly in the 'right' place. Part of the complexity with this location is that by that time of the day, some shadows are starting to impinge on some landing and flight path areas. Having said all of that, I'm in that odd camp that actually isn't keen (usually) on direct-on light but prefer a bit of shadowing to bring out some detail. With light directly behind, subjects can look very flat, which I don't usually like. Just me though!

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Glenn, 10/10 for incoming pose with perfect outspread wings, and love the fanned tail too. Good DOF on this fellow, and the late light on him really makes him pop against the darker BG. Well captured.