yellow warbler

[Rene Quenneville]

After posting several picture with distracting background and foreground elements, here is a simple composition. I wish the sky was blue but I do not control this aspect of the picture. I know I could do it in PS but it is such a big crop that I do not feel it is worth doing.

Is the head position ok? Is it distracting that we can see a little of the far eye?

1/1250
f/7.1
ISO 400
420mm (300 +1.4TC)
fill flash at -1 2/3 with BB
meetered in manual mode

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Rene,

What did histogram look like, It looks bright, almost high-key.

Beautiful bird and the techs look ok. Image looks a tad soft or flat, probably from large crop or too much flash?

[Doug Brown]

I don't mind the high-key look Rene. I would crop off the top and move the bird to the left of the frame. I'd like to see more of a profile view of the bird's head. The bird's plumage has quite a bit of noise in it, which is surprising for ISO 400. Was this substantially underexposed and then recovered in PP?

[Aidan Briggs]

I like the high key look. As Doug, and Jeff mentioned, the bird is both noisy and soft. You might try boosting the contrast to just the eye.

[Rene Quenneville]

Noise comes from a boost of 1 stop in lightroom combined with a major crop. Thank you all for your input.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Rene,

The +1 in LR was to move image to the right to better balance histogram or was it to unclip blacks (does that make sense)?