Roseate Spoonbill

[Paul Merritt]

Taken with 40D and 400 f5.6L

Av Mode ISO 100 1/500 sec f/5.6

[Phil Ertel]

I think the composition is effective. In my opinion you captured the bird in a nice pose with a complimentary background. I like the separation of the bird from the background and the way the perch enters the frame.

I would suggest increasing your ISO. I almost always start at 400 on my 40D. If exposed properly the 40D handles ISO at 400 in my opinion, very well. As I am sure you know that by increasing the ISO you can gain some shutter speed and increase your changes of making a sharp image (although you did well here) and/or gain more light to work with. As presented the image seems a little dark to me. I would have dialed in some positive exposure compensation and/or increased the ISO to gain some light. One minor additional observation is that I find the branch that blocks our view of the feet mildly distracting. Not much you could have done about it though as I don't think changing your location of capture would have help in this case. I just mention as something to be aware of next time ( I am sure I would have pressed the shutter release in this situation also).

If this were mine I would make the following post capture adjustment. I think your image has a lot of potential. To demonstrate, I made the following adjustments in photoshop. I hope you don't mind. If you were wanting a dark mood you won't like these edits as they do change the presentation from dark to light. Remember your the artist so it is up to you if these suggestions are worth the effort or have merit (hopefully I am not boring you with the detail below).
1. I first made a selection of the bird and perch using a combination of the quick selection tool and quick masking. I saved that selection as a new channel.
2. I created two layers using the saved selection. One of the bird and perch and one of the background.
3. I then ran shadow/highlights on the bird to open the shadow. I also used a curve layer to adjust brightness of the bird.
4. I increased the vibrances of the bird a little and selectively sharpened the the head of the bird.
5. The last adjustment I made to the bird was to selectively add a multiply layer to darken the the bill. If I remember correctly the I set the opacity of this layer at approximately 12-15%.
6. On the background layer I first lightened it, desaturated the layer a little, and burned the highlights. Up to this point I haven;t done anything but basic adjustments. However, at this point in editing I didn't like the dark patch in the background behind the bird. So using a technique from Robert O'Toole's APTATS II, I fill in the dark patch to make the background more uniform. You may not be willing to make this type of edit but, I have included it to demonstrate a possibility.
7. Lightening the background brought out some noise. Therefore, I ran Guassian blur (1.5 pixels on the background to reduce the noise.

Thanks for sharing.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Very nice capture, I like the angle, BG and eye contact, I wish the branch covering the feet were not there. I really like the well-explained repost by Phil.