white throated sparrow

[Rene Quenneville]

I am slowly learning how to approach these little ones. It was taken in an open field this afternoon.
Please give me your comments. Are the branches and leaves too distractive?

1/640
f/9
ISO 400
-1/3 EV
fill flash with BB at - 1 2/3
300mm +1.4 TC

[Randy Stout]

Rene:

Your bird is sharp,well exposed, nice angle in frame. Most excellent eye.
some of the brighter leaves could be toned down to your advantage, IMO.
The biggest distraction for me is the OOF stick on the right side angling up towards the birds beak.
I might consider cropping down from the top to just a tiny bit above the highest leaf on the right margin.
Thanks for sharing! Keep sneaking up on them!!

Randy

[Tony Whitehead]

Lovely pose and sharpness, Rene. I agree with Randy re the OOF foreground stick and slight crop from above. The 2 other small issues for me would be the bright leaf emerging from the breast and the stick behind the bird rising from the perch. Both of these should be easy clone/patch jobs if you are so inclined.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the pose, angle and details and agree that the vertical foreground OOF branch and the leaf in the lower left are a bit distracting.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

The exposure looks good, why the f/9 just curious, you had plenty of shutter anyway - right?

These WTS can be challenging, they are always in the middle of some scrubby brush, nice eye level picture, just some PS technique to eliminate the distractions and make it as clean as possible, nice exposure, well done.

[Mital Patel]

i like the pose eyecontact and overlall image except all three moderators suggested some points.

[Arthur Morris]

Excellent critiques above to which I would add that the image features a perfect HA. The feathers of the bird seem lacking in fine detail; is this a crop?

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

As Jeff suggested, a bigger aperture might have been better. Dont know if its my monitor..but it looks a little overexposed to me. The head angle and the catchlight are excellent.

[Rene Quenneville]

Thank you all for your comments. It is very appreciated. Artie, Unfortunately it is a crop. With my 420mm reach, I do not try to go closer without a blind. I will try to do the cloning job later (on a rainy day!!)
Jeff, As for the f/9 question. With an f/4 lens and a TC, I try to stay at f/8 or higher for maximum sharpness. On the other hand with small birds I try to keep my shutter speed over 1/500 s because they move constantly. When I cannot meet these 2 parameters, I raise the ISO. If you have a better recipe, please feel free to let me know.

[Mark Dumbleton]

Super exposure here Rene. Agree on the slightly distracting twig right of the bird. Also some room to the right in my mind would improve the comp.