Taken at Boodjamulla NP far northwestern Queensland, Australia. A habit of a lot of Australian Robins is to often flick their tails up and I have captured that action here.
50D, 100-400 @ 350, iso auto @ 400, Av f7, 1/125, ev 0, 430EXII -1.33 HH
I have applied most of the things I have learned since joining BPN- thanks for all the helpfull input.
-added canvas to LHS and because the original almost clipped the tail
-toned down the highlights on the perch
-gave the bird a face-lift
-cleaned out a flash highlight from the eye
There's bound to be more room for improvement so your advice is welcome as usual.
I like your composition and clean BG. If this were mine I'd definitely sharpen the eye more, tone down the highlights in the BG, and boost the saturation overall. Perhaps a stronger fill as well; I see shadows on the subject, probably from nearby branches. Great effort!
I love the alert pose and the raised tail feathers. You did a pretty nice job with your fill flash. A better light angle would have been nice though. Your point of critical focus appears to be in front of the eye; I'd sharpen the eye selectively. All in all a nice job!
I agree with comments above, neat pose, but the background is a bit overexposed and the bird needs some contrast boosting and perhaps a touch of saturation. Other than that, I think that this image is good enough to invest more time in RAW converter and photoshop to produce a good result :-)
Good advice from above, and I would also make the pupil all black except for the smaler catchlight at the 10 o'clock position. Good job on the canvas extention - there is just a bit of touching uo to do at the tail tip. This fella sure gave you a nice pose!
Nice one Colin - you've captured the jizz of the bird perfectly. Agree with comments re exposure and saturation but you have a wonderful image to work from.
Thankyou for the helpful comments. So I've had another go at it starting with the RAW image and hopefully successfully implementing all suggestions. At this point I might be at the limits of my DPP/CS3 capability but that will improve!