Eastern Bluebird (male)

[Arsdel Fluesmeier]

40D, Canon 100-400@400mm, 1/250 f 8.0, ISO 400

[Randy Stout]

Arsdel:

I like the framing, the diagonal of the tail and perch and exposure.

The head is turned away. I find a natural perch (no evidence of being sawed off) is more flattering to the bird.

I am not sure what is causing all the specular highlights in the background, they are mildly distracting to me.

Thanks for posting.

Randy

[Daniel Cadieux]

Randy has touched on all the points I was thinking of - but the two main ones are head angle and perch. I also see a few vertical clone marks in ULC.

[Doug Brown]

I like the rich blue color of the bird. I agree with Randy's observations about head turn and the perch. I don't see any specular highlights in the BG; it's bokeh. Specular highlights are very small areas of bright white reflection that contain no meaningful image information. The OOF grey color in some areas of the BG is somewhat distracting, but that could easily be made green. I would eliminate the cloning artifact in the ULC.

[Randy Stout]

Thanks Doug for the correction.

Poor choice of terms on my part.

Randy