Northern Cardinal Landing

[Nate Chappell]

Hi everyone, here's one from Bill Forbes's pond taken last spring. The cardinals were dropping down to this perch which had a feeder from a nearby tree so I manually focused on the perch and fired off a round when one dropped onto the perch. This was my favorite image from the effort. It's cropped and I removed an oof branch from the right.

1DMarkIII 500F4 1/5000 F6.3 iso 640, Gitzo tripod blind

[Manos Papadomanolakis]

beautiful bg`s color,pose,details...light!

[Stu Bowie]

Landing shots close to their perch arent easy to pull off, but you have nailed this. I like the light, colours and sharpness. Well captured.

[Adrian David]

Excelent capture! I love the pose and the smooth BG. Well done!

[Daniel Cadieux]

Interesting pose, and the bit of perch peeking into the frame is an important element IMO. I do wish for either some sort of reflection or catchlight in the eye.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Pose, sharpness and BG look very good. I agree, a catchlight would have been nice.

[Keith Bauer]

Love the pose and nice wing spread. I keep looking and wanting a bit more room on the bottom as the part of the perch visible is minimal. Still a very nice imate.

[Kurt Bowman]

Beautiful Nate! I agree about the catch light, but I am fine with the amount of perch you show. Love the angle the Cardinal is coming in at.

[Danny Laredo]

Nice timing and capture.

[Morkel Erasmus]

lovely landing pose, exposure and image quality here. a catchlight would have been nice but not a biggy for me.

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Well timed using good technique. good call on high iso( inspite of good light) to get that sort of SS needed for small birds in flight. You really froze him. Very well done.

[Steve Canuel]

Hi Nate,
Really nice shot. I love the angle and wing positions of the bird (especially the forked tail feathers). BG colors compliment the bird nicely and the look of concentration on the bird as he makes his approach makes up for any lack of catchlight.

[arash_hazeghi]

Excellent landing pose and great details, nice BG too, everything is excellent here, agree with adding catch light if your ethics allow.

[Simon Bennett]

A beauty Nate.