Post #2000 (a bit late!!) - Red Billed Quelea (female)

[Morkel Erasmus]

It was with a shock I realised I had gone past 2000 posts on BPN and hardly noticed it ;).
Thanks to everyone for making this a great community...

I am renting some Nikon equipment for my upcoming trip to Kruger National Park and took it for a test in a reserve close to Pretoria in order to get familiar with the controls etc.

I am really impressed...

I feel I have outgrown my Canon 1000D and was contemplating an upgrade to the 7D...the Nikon gear has made the choice even harder :)

Very little processing done here - exposure adjustment in RAW, slight crop, sharpening after resize, removed twig under the butt.

I wish the beak-tip wasn't in shadow.

Techs:
Nikon D300s with 200-400mm f4 VR @ 400mm
f4.0 @ 1/3200 SS @ ISO-400
Exp +0.3

[Harshad Barve]

Morkelbhai
Big time congrats for 2k and looking forward to see many more
One beautiful image , lovely settings and nice compo
TFS

[arash_hazeghi]

Congrats Morkel on the achieved milestone, nice shot too love the setting and nice detail I would sharpen a bit more to give it more pop. D300s is sure a big upgrade from the Rebel.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the pose, eye contact and BG and agree about more sharpening and wish there were separation between beak and perch. Belated congratulations on the milestone! :)

[Kiran Poonacha]

Yeah bhai, give it one round of sharpening, congrats on the milestone bhai, keep them coming...

[Randy Stout]

Morkel:

Belated congrats on 2000.

Techs mentioned above. I might consider a different crop. I am not sure all the empty space above adds much to the image, and might consider cropping down 40-50% of the free space.

Always a tough decision about switching gear. Depends usually on how much money you have tied up in glass.

Good luck.'

Randy

[Morkel Erasmus]

thanks for the kind comments everyone!

here is a slightly sharper version...

[Juan Aragonés]

Belated congratulations for the milestone Morkel :-)
I would prefer less room at the top but the composition works for me. Like the head turn and eye contact a lot.

With luck with your decission about the new gear, coming from a 1000D you can´t go wrong with a 7D or with Nikon stuff

[Morkel Erasmus]

thank you Juan...

[Doug Brown]

Congratulations Morkel and thanks for all of your contributions to the BPN community! We're fortunate to be able to choose between such excellent gear these days; you can't go wrong either way.