I captured this Kingfisher at a NWR near Houston in February. Would love to hear your comments. I think I should have gone down to F8 or so. Taken with XTi and 100-400 F13 1/500 iso 400.
These birds are very difficult subjects, you did pretty well to get a nice image of one. Looks sharp in the eye and beak, good feather detail also. The white around the neck is a little hot, maybe an exposure comp of -1/3 or so would get the white under control for you.He looks like he is hunkered down so a little small in the overall frame on that big perch. Yes, I think f13 is generally not optimum but your BG is nicely blurred so you did ok with it!
Hi Trey, thanks for sharing, this is a nice first post! It's better than any KF photograph that I have in my collection. These are definitely a tough bird to get close to so you did well! I'll echo the other comments, f7 or f8 probably would have been a better choice. Your background is still nice, however a larger aperture would have made it even better. I'm not sure how much you've already cropped this image.... If you haven't cropped much it might help to crop the bottom, maybe so you only see about 1/2 or 1/3 of the current stump size...
Hi Trey,
this is one of my very famous birds (together with the atlantic puffin :-)) I think, the bird would look much more impressive, if you cut off may be a third of the picture from the bottom, so that the perch ist not so prominent in the picture.
You made a real lovely picture of that beautyful bird! I whish it would be mine....