Hi Richard - Nice find and I like the comp. Image quality has suffered greatly from the cropping, and the most important part of the bird (its eye) is in the shade. I'd work on getting closer to the subject and waiting for more even lighting to strike the bird. In this version, the highlights are too bright and I'd look to done them down.
I like the head poking out of the nesting activity. The open beak of the calling infant is also appealing. The light was still rather harsh or the image has been a little over exposed as the image appears quite bright to me. I tried a couple of things but the one that I thought worked best was I used a brightness / contrast layer to reduce the brightness, lightened the eye and reduce the reds a little as there were clipped a little. Last I tried a different crop to eliminate the dark strip on our right. I sure you could do a better job of it by reprocessing the original file. Thanks for sharing.
Richard, I agree with the others that you had a tough shooting situation. Given that you mention the large crop, I'm not sure whether your shooting distance would have made a touch of fill-flash an option. Phil's repost looks like a nice improvement to me.
Yes, the ORIG was way too bright and I am surprised that Phil was able to do so well with it. Flash of some sort would have definitely improved this one.
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