Striated Heron

[Paul Burdett]

This Heron posed nicely for me a while ago. Hope you like it. Cheers.

D500/500PF, 1/1000th sec@f6.3, iso1000, manual mode, HH

[Randy Stout]

Paul:
Nice pose, love the grungy feet, curved lower perch.

I might consider lightening the mid tones a bit to brighten the birds body a modest amount.

I find the image too large and on my 27" monitor it requires scrolling vertically to see the entire frame. I find 1200 px is about as tall as I can go without causing this problem.

I could see a little tweaking of the crop, with a modest amount off the top, and a small amount off the right side. Just personal taste.

Cheers

Randy

[Paul Burdett]

Randy: Thank you for the feedback/suggestions. I agree re the midtones...and I'll adjust them. As for the crop, I chose this as I like the graduated colour between the FG and BG, and didn't want to lose some of the FG colour. I also wanted to avoid a box like crop, but can see your point and will re crop and see. Cheers.

[Steve Kaluski]

Agree with Randy's points here Paul, but also lifting the shadows/contrast too helps. I'm guessing, being backlit it's thrown the metering and so I would expose for the subject and worry about the BKG later in PP. The IQ will be better.

TFS
Steve

[John Mack]

Nice statue like pose. Like the view of the feet gripping that perch.

[Paul Burdett]

Thanks Steve & John. Points noted...cheers. Did a re edit...better?

[arash_hazeghi]

I like the view of the feet, you might want to back off a bit in sharpening as it has caused some noise and crunchiness. I'd get rid of the the 2nd branch...wish you had a more colorful BG and some sunlight on the bird. this is a common bird so I am sure you will run into him on a better day

TFS

[Paul Burdett]

Thanks Arash...points noted. Must admit I don't see a lot of noise though.

[Arthur Morris]

The repost is compositionally better but I would go even closer to 3X2. The boxy crop in the original post left much too much room and included too many distracting branches on the left and thus was not at all called for.

Looks like the bird with the common name in the Galapagos. Sharp. The face looks a bit too smoothed to me.

with love, artie

[Paul Burdett]

Thanks Artie. You may mean 2x3? I'll check out the "smoothed" face and may re-edit. cheers.