King fisher Feathers

[Chris Kotze]

Feather or not ?:)
Canon 40D
Canon 100-400
SS 1/400
ISO 400
f9.0

Kruger national Park

[Arthur Morris]

Feather! Incredible detail and sharpness. Perfect head angle. Killer BKGR. Species?

May I ask how you got so close? I find myself wishing to see more of that beautiful breast. Do you have a full frame vertical of the whole bird?

[Stu Bowie]

Hey Chris, looks like she's just come out of the water. Excellent sharpness, and the feather on the end of the beak puts this over the top. Artie, this is a giant kingfisher - the largest of all the kingfisher species.

[Tony Whitehead]

Lovely and sharp. DOF covers the subject well. BG and light great. Nice to see a GK not from Mankwe :D

[Aidan Briggs]

Great BG, light, and details. I love the feather in the bill. I would like to see a vertical as well.

Well done!!

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Wow...this is insanely good. Loved the sharpness, that feather, BG, head turn...everything pretty much. Thx for sharing.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great light, sharpness, eye contact and the feather makes this one for me and would try to selectively sharpen the single feather.

[Fabs Forns]

This is so cute, offering the feather for the project :)
Great details in the plumage, sharp as attack and very well exposed.
Is that the sun is his eye or a flash?
Thanks for participating in the project!

[Art Kornienko]

Wow for sure, sharpness is amazing as is the light and bg. Was this a minimum foucsing distance and what focal length?

[Chris Kotze]

Thanks for all the kind comments it's much appreciated.
Artie the Giant were were sitting on a bridge railing as I drove slowly towards it I took my opportunity. Unfortunately not the best of perch so I took more head and shoulder shots.
Fabs Yep it's the late afternoon sun in the eye's.
Art. the focal length is 400mm and subject distance 5M

Here's a vertical shot unfortunately with the bridge railing

[Ofer Levy]

I love this!!!

[Arthur Morris]

Thanks Chris, I love both of them. For the repost I leveled it, added canvas right quickly with an APTATS II trick, and did some BKGR smoothing work with QMs, a reduced opacity Clone Stamp Tool, and finally, a 3 pixel Gaussian blur on the whole image and then painting back the bird and the bridge with a Layer Mask applied to the blur Layer. All as described in Digital Basics and APTATS I :)

[Krijn Trimbos]

Gorgeous Chris. A very effective head portrait, with amazing colours and feather detail! The feather makes this one for me.

[Chris Kotze]

Thanks Krijn and Artie the repost looks great :) Yep I need to get your CD