American Kestrel

[Desmond Chan]

D300 200-400 @ 400, hand-held . Manual exposure mode, no flash. ISO 400 f4 1/1600sec.

Cropped. Natural background. Removed a couple of twigs.

I found the Kestrel !!

[Lance Peters]

Gorgeous Desmond - love the pose and teh perch - good HA and eye contact - sharp throughout. BG compliments the bird well - Big Congrats :)

[Gus Cobos]

Nicely done Desmond,
You have a good head angle and sharp eye...the details are sharp with good color rendition...a big congrats...well done...:cool:

[Chris Baker]

I'm green with envy Desmond, I've never been able to get anywhere near one of these. I like the pose and the blue and brown BG compiment the bird nicely, it's a belter!
Regards
Chris Baker

[Alberto Oria]

Lovely image Desmond, no nits.

[Graham Smith.]

Great shot of this fluffed up Kestrel Desmond! Very nice colours, and the BG is great too. unfortunate twig at the bottom left, but not much can be done about that (as far as I know).
Nice work!

[Ilija Dukovski]

Excellent image. The birds is superb and the BG is great too.

Cheers,

[denise ippolito]

Desmond, Fantastic capture-these guys are so skittish,hard to get a sharp image of them,You did really good the details and fluffed up feathers are great! Nice eye contact and BG colors are very complimentary-I just see some clone marks near bottom of image .Well done!

[Gail Spitler]

So that's where you've been - stalking kestrels. This is totally superb.
Gail

[Nonda Surratt]

Wonderful image of a tough bird..Good going Desmond!

[KurtPreston]

I'm jealous too! Been after a kestrel for a while now with no luck. Beautiful shot! Well done.

[Richard Waas]

Very nice Desmond. I love the pose and the detail is fabulous...... Great job!!!

[Desmond Chan]

Thanks folks for the nice comments !

Actually, it is more like this particular kestrel is easier than the others to approach rather than I am getting better in stalking and getting close to birds. I was told there's a couple more kestrels in pretty much the same area, but they are not as photographer friendly as this one is.

As for the clone marks, you may be seeing some out-of-focus elements in the background as they appear in the original raw file, too. Anyhow, whatever it is, I think that area of the photo could use some polishing then.

[Deborah Kral]

Thanks folks for the nice comments !

Actually, it is more like this particular kestrel is easier than the others to approach rather than I am getting .

I'm so envious, I've been looking for a "photo-friendly" kestrel for years and the best I could ever do was a rehab bird or birds on wires. Lovely light, nice detail and I like the color echo with the blue background.

This bird doesn't happen to be in NY?

[Desmond Chan]

This bird doesn't happen to be in NY?

Unfortunately it's nowhere near NY. It's in BC, Canada.

Thanks for the comments, Deborah !