Yellow-billed Hornbill

[Glenn Pure]

The bird was on the ground with its partner looking for insects. Crop is about half of the frame area. Taken next to an airstrip in the Savute, Botswana as we waiting for a light aircraft flight to our next destination.

Thank you for looking and for any comments you are kind enough to share.

Technical: Canon 80D with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/2000 sec, f8, ISO 800. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 3, crop, lighting adjustments, NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Modest NR applied to bird and stronger to background. Some blur added along with tone flattening of background. Bird only sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian Blur: 0.4 pixels at 50%) after final size reduction.

[Michael Thompson]

Amazing bird, wow, just waiting for a flight, and you saw that! very interesting colors in that huge bill! To bad you couldn
t get the sun behind you, but it would be kind of hard at a place like that. still a neat shot, congrats

[gail bisson]

A lot to like here.
I really like the shadow cast by the eyelashes onto the eye. Good IQ and DOF.
In a perfect world the stem to the right and intersecting the head would not be there.
I like your comp but could also see a version with a bit more on the lhs,
Gail

[William Dickson]

Very nice Glenn. Gail beat me to it, the eye lashes immediately drew my attention. POVs good. I would remove the stem behind the head. The light angle don't bother me, I think it brings character to the bird. Nice detail and colours.

Well done

Will

[Matt Shellenberg]

A great look at this Hornbill, Glenn. Very nice detail and I like that profile pose.

[Bill Dix]

Good frame of this bird, with his signature bill parallel to the focal plane. I also love the eyelashes. I hope to see one of these when we go to Botswana.

[Glenn Pure]

Thank you all for your comments. These days, I avoid cloning so, while I understand the comments about the stem from Gail and Will, I will leave it. But appreciate the suggestion nonetheless - I need to learn to watch my backgrounds more carefully!

Bill, can't wait to see your photos - when are you going?

[Tim Foltz]

Glenn, wild looking bird with awesome colors, I know sometimes you can't have the light where you want it and it's unavoidable at times and you made the best of it.
I would like to see it a tad higher in frame to get rid of some of that negative space, the twigs, while they're not ideal that's a part of "wild" nature photography
and it's your choice to clone or not.

-Tim

[Glenn Pure]

I would like to see it a tad higher in frame to get rid of some of that negative space, the twigs, while they're not ideal that's a part of "wild" nature photography
and it's your choice to clone or not.

-Tim

Thanks Tim - good point on the composition. I can't bring any more bird in from the bottom as there is some messy vegetation intruding but I could take some off the top and move close to a pano crop.