White-faced Ibis

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Sony A850~Sony 70-400G@400mm~ISO 1250~1/1250sec~F5.6~manual exposure~HH~overcast~1-31-2011~Brazos Bend State Park, Texas~CS5
comments and critique welcomed. regards~Bill

my website

[Colin Driscoll]

Those pastel browns and greens are great! All up a beatiful shot!

[Randy Stout]

Bill:

You did a fine job showing the subtle palette of colors in the underwings. BG gives depth to image without being distracting.

I think it is a bit tight, and if you have more, would add some on the bottom and a bit on top.

The near wing looks a bit sharper than the head/eye to me. Perhaps a bit more sharpening ?

The soft light really helped you here.

Cheers

Randy

[Marina Scarr]

Hi Bill:

You captured a lovely bird. I like the positioning of the bird, but feel he needs more room. Agree on more sharpening of the head.

Would love to see one of these birds some day. They have been spotted here and there but never got to photograph one.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Appeciate the feedback! I already added canvas, but I agree it needs more. The original filled the frame. A toenail was clipped which didn't cause too much of a problem when expanding the canvas. I used content-aware fill in CS5 to add more room and in this case it worked very well.
I was taking pictures of the bird feeding when it decided to fly directly toward me. I shot half a dozen images before it landed in front of me. I had very little time to set focus, even though not a fast flyer the close proximity made it seem faster, and I had little opportunity to focus specifically on the head which I would have preferred. I had no time to adjust the two parameters that were called for; increase F stop considerably to not only get all of a very close subject in focus, but also to compensate for AF aquisition errors, and increase the shutter-speed. Nonetheless it came out better than I would have predicted, and selective sharpening of the head certainly would help. I'll process another in the sequence with the suggestions made in mind and post it.
Randy; you are absolutely correct about the soft light. regards~Bill