This was taken about six months ago. I have just been going through photos from a trip to the Sturt Desert - Central Australia.
A pair of parrots, this is one of them, were nesting in a dead tree tree hollow.This was taken with a hired camera and lens - eos 550d, 100-400 f4 is usm @ 390mm, 1/640 @7.1, 100 ISO.
Interesting. Despite the tree dominating the image I still find it works very well. That tree does have nice weathering on it. Difficult light angle...as is it gives nice textures to the tree by giving some shadows to the crevices and trenches, but looks weaker on the parrot with heavy shade on the right side. If the head was angled a bit more towards us the areas between the eye and bill (and the red above the bill) would have been better lit. Still an appealing image though.
Oh, I would also make disappear the faint OOF branches below the perch...
Love that branch and the parrot's stunning. One thing I have contemplated a while now is that while it's good to know a trick or two about photoshop and its tools that make things go "poof" - err, disappear - the thing that makes you a better photographer is how you capture the scene. If those little oof branches were there and you could not do much about them by changing position etc, then in my opinion you are already a good photographer. Cheers.....
Yea the OOF trees in the back ground could be cloned out - I may try that.
I know a lot more now than I did 6 months ago when I got started with this photography business. This was shot as a Jpeg not RAW and for all I knew the sun could come from any angle. And I was oblivious to head angle.
This location was difficult - we had arrived quite late in the day and the sun was going down. We were leaving first thing in the morning. The tree that is in this shot was surrounded by water and I was standing at the very edge of the lake.