Grey Crowned Crane

[philperry]

The Grey Crowned Crane was a much sought after bird for me. I finally managed to get close enough for a portrait photo on my last trip to Tanzania's Serengeti. A pair were feeding early morning and allowed our safari vehicle to follow them for long enough to take a range of photos.
Equipment:
Canon EOS 40D
Canon EOS 400mm DO f4 + 1.4x
1/640th @ f7
ISO 400 (my 'standard')
Crop: The original format was landscape so I just cropped to change it to portrait format, with just a little crop in terms of height.

[David Fletcher]

Beautiful portrait of this GCC Phil. There's some clipping of the whites in ACR, nothing major. Lovely sharpness and bokeh from that lens too. Thanks for sharing.

[Morkel Erasmus]

they truly are stunning birds Phil - too bad that there aren't many left roaming wild in South Africa.

lovely portrait here with all the colours (except the hot whites) spot on and details super.

[Phil Ertel]

Pretty nice portrait with a pleasing composition. If it were mine I would try and bring more detail out of the blacks. I would also tone down the feathers on the neck as they seem a bit bright to me. I wish for more detail in the whites.

[Gal Shon]

I like the Comp, the crown, eye contact, shapness and BG.
I would tone down the white a little bit.

[Harshad Barve]

what a cool crown ,
lovely compo , sharpness and BG , hot whites mentioned
TFS

[philperry]

Thanks guys. Working on blacks and whites is already on my Photoshop technique learning list. That will be next up when I get some time to play around with Photoshop. I am sure that would tweak this image nicely.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Phil, I like the comp,and pose, and good detail and colours on the head. I would be tempted to give this a touch of sharpening.

[philperry]

Thanks Stuart. I am just about to download some new sharpening software and will try it out over the next few weeks to see if I can get mproved results.