white-tailed kite perched image

[Phil Seu]

the BG is actually a distant hill and not the sky.

nikon d300, 600 vr plus 1.7x. f/8, 1/400, iso 500.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the eye contact, light and BG. It looks as if you ran NR on the image, which removed the fine details.

[James Salywoda]

A great bird and shot Phil not easy birds to find around here anymore.....

[Phil Ertel]

Hi Phil, I like the the placement of the bird in frame and how the branch emerges from the corner. In addition to Axel's comment it appears to have a blue cast on my monitor. I used the average blur layer to adjust. As always it is up to you to decide if this helps or not as you were there and I wasn't. Thanks for sharing.

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Love the pose and composition of this one Phill. I would love to see one of these beauties one day and many thanks for sharing.

[Dan Busby]

Very nice Phil. This is going to seem weird, but those three holes at the top the branch keep drawing my eye away from the bird!

[Luis Villablanca]

I also like pose and composition of the image. Phil Ertel's color correction are spot on.
Maybe it's just me, but I would clone out the white patch around the head since it seems a bit distracting.
Where did you shoot the Kestrel, btw? Arastradero?

[Chris van Rooyen]

Great posture and sharpness, I think the repost is a tad better as far as colour balance is concerned. This bird is a virtual clone of our Black-shouldered Kite, the Elanus kites are such photogenic birds!

[Tony Whitehead]

Nice relaxed pose. Agree with Phil on the cast but would be tempted to partially mask the correction from the BG to keep some of the blue from the original. There does seem to be a loss of detail and some sharpening artifacts on the branch - was this a significant crop?

[Phil Seu]

the loss of some detail is due to the amount of cropping. i am going to try and get closer to this perch using a bag blind next time.

thank you for correcting the blue cast. my personal preference is for something in between the two images.

Phil

[Art Kornienko]

Sure is a beauty Phil, love he crop and pose, agree about removing the bluish cast, nice sharpness.