Small bird, big tail

[Glenn Pure]

I'll admit to posting this for its novelty. The bird is a male Shaft-tailed Whydah in breeding plumage. The long tail is part of that plumage. Normally there are four tail feathers but I didn't see any with all four. Taken in Etosha NP, Namibia in May this year next to one of the lodge waterholes. It was a delight to watch these flying around with other birds, presumably as part of his courtship ritual. Difficult composition choices due to the tail length. The crop is around half of the frame area, cropped from horizontal. Some distracting cut-off foliage cloned out.

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 1/2500 sec, f7.1, ISO 640. 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 to background mainly to keep file size down. Selective adjustments selectively to bird (reduce shadows, add midtone contrast). Bird only sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian Blur: 0.6 pixels at 50%) after final size reduction.

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

Nice Capture. I do thing adding more canvas at the bottom will really help the image.
Nice exposure.

Thanks for sharing

[William Dickson]

Hi Glenn. I bet this wasn't easy choosing the crop. I do like your chosen crop. Lovely detail on the bird with nice colours throughout the image. Lovely looking bird and what a tail.

Will

[Randy Stout]

Glenn:

I have always thought that doing justice to long tailed birds with the file size limitations in the past was difficult. The new file size options really help!


Sharp, well exposed. The tail does remain a challenge re: crop. Other than a bit more below, I think this is good choice for this bird and pose.

Cheers

Randy

[Joseph Przybyla]

Hi Glenn, beautiful bird, nicely shown. I am not familiar with the bird so I cannot comment on the colors, exposure and detail look good. I wonder about moving the bird more to the upper left hand corner with more room under the tail. I do think cutting the end of the perch/branch would hurt the image. Thank you for sharing.

[Bill Dix]

Great looking bird. Maybe I'll see one in Botswana. Yes to a bit more room on the bottom. Short of rotating the whole bird vertically I don't know how you could crop it any differently.

[Glenn Pure]

Great looking bird. Maybe I'll see one in Botswana. Yes to a bit more room on the bottom. Short of rotating the whole bird vertically I don't know how you could crop it any differently.

Thanks Bill. RE crop, yes, I think the bottom is a bit tight and probably should have done a canvas extension. As for seeing one, I did not spot them until we reached Namibia and the first sighting was quite exciting with the long tail really standing out. The species distribution is centred on Botswana so I hope you have some luck there. Either way, you are bound to see lots of wonderful birds and hopefully come back with many great photos which I'll look forward to viewing.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Glenn, great show of the tail here, and I like that you have full DOF on the Wydah all the way down to the tip of the tail. I see a lot of the normal Pin Tail Whydah's here, but have not seen a Shaft Tailed Whydah.

I would have added a bit of canvas below, and then resized/cropped to your posting size.