Breakfast like a king

[Jay Shah]

Steppe eagle finishing off common crane. Image was taken at Little Rann of Kutch, India. This is a huge, arid and flat land with water body which attracts migratory water birds during winter months from Central Asia and Europe. In turn, it becomes home to some twenty types of raptors also spending their winter here. Because of the flat and arid land, BG is generally quite clean.

Nikon D500, Nikon 600 mm f/4
1/1600 s, f8, ISO 640

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Jay, Sharp with a good subject to sensor plane orientation. But lots of questions from me. Why do much room below the bird? Why no TC-E14? Why not point the camera to our left to get the whole feather pile?

Lastly, the bird and the light looks very red; is the color accurate? With love, artie

[arash_hazeghi]

love the drama, the prey and the HA. Framing is a bit awkward as Artie mentioned and the IQ isn't great on my screen, looks like RAW was soft and you had to apply a lot of sharpening

TFS

[Daniel Cadieux]

I love the scene, the subject, and what is left of the prey. Composition, as noted, is not best it could with everything too high and left in the frame. Was this cropped? Do you have more to include at left and above (to then crop below and right)?

[John Mack]

Pretty neat frame here like the prey and the light. Agree what the others have said about the crop.

[Jay Shah]

Thank you John, Daniel,Arash and Artie for your comments. I am learning a lot, so please keep them coming. Two things limited my making best image from the opportunity available. First, this was the very first time I was shooting from a vehicle using bean bag. I was struggling to keep the long lens balanced. Second, as we were shooting from the car, it was not possible to move much to frame the shot. Artie, I was using D500. So on previous day, often I was too close. So I did not put on TC for this session but I agree it would have helped. Bird was quite skittish, staying for a very short time before flying off. So no chance to put TC on.

Based on the comments, I have reprocessed image by adding some canvas on the left. Re-cropped. Also reduce sharpening as suggested by Arash.I did increase exposure by 1 stop, that might have added fair bit of noise as I did not touch shadow slider in ACR and yet there was lot of noise. I only partially applied Neat image NR to not lose too much details.

Please let me know what you think and could be improved.

[arash_hazeghi]

the repost is better, it explains the IQ if the RAW was under exposed. I think you made the best out of this situation, I wish to see a steppe eagle some day

[Saeid Heidari-Soureshjani]

Its nice photo but i dont like the black spots on your BG