Blue-tailed Bee-eater

[girisholeti]

Canon 7D, Canon 500mm f4, ISO 200, f5.6, 1/1000 Sec

[Ken Watkins]

Girisholeti,

Marvelous capture of a species I have never seen, marvelous capture for the bee-eater as well

[Mital Patel]

Bhai,

This is marvelous shot. liked the diagonal composition from tail to tail. Green is giving typical rich Karnataka feel.

you just missed the flie's wing cloned on bg.

[Randy Stout]

Girisholeti:

Lovely pose, colors, diagonal in frame, well scaled perch, prey item in such good shape.

Good pickup by Mital about the wing clone mark.

Maybe a sliver more room around the tail.

Striking!

Cheers

Randy

[Sidharth Kodikal]

Fantastic on many level, Girish. Diagonal, bg, light, expo, prey - everything to die for.
Clone mark mentioned.

[MohsenVahedipour]

What a great capture. I like diagonal pose, perch, nice BG & hunted dragonfly.

[Ron Sprunger]

It's a wonderful capture, near perfect in all respects, great behavior, and a beautiful bird. Agree with Randy that a little more left and bottom would be nice.

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

Awesome capture Great color and bg. I see the remnants of the cloned wing

[Andrew McLachlan]

Very nice capture...pose and background. All it needs is the remnants of the wing evicted. Nice one!

[Arthur Morris]

A stunner on all counts as noted by the boys and girls above. Girish, did you erect this perch? IAC, I could not stand the broken bits of branch and twigs.... Used a bunch of small Quick Masks and a 90% hardness Clone Stamp Tool to try and sculpt the end of the perch somewhat naturally.

[Arthur Morris]

ps: Added a bit of additional sharpness: 90/.3/0 in Unsharp Mask.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Beautiful image, love the colours and the composition, great timing.

[yogesh_puranik]

lovely green mood superb light moment and sharpness..

[girisholeti]

Thank you all for your nice words. The wing clone mark is a sloppy work on my part. Need to be more attentive in future.

Artie, thanks for the repost. It definitely looks better esp. the dragon fly wings have more details.

The perch is not a natural one. But I didn't setup that. Some one has done that by the time I went there and I just used it

[Arthur Morris]

Thank you all for your nice words. The wing clone mark is a sloppy work on my part. Need to be more attentive in future. Artie, thanks for the repost. It definitely looks better esp. the dragon fly wings have more details. The perch is not a natural one. But I didn't setup that. Some one has done that by the time I went there and I just used it

In general if you uncheck the Align box while cloning you can avoid such problems; I know from experience . YAW: I did not use my full sharp 1024 px JPEG sharpening settings (175/.30/0 on average). You need to educate the perch setter-uppers. broken of twigs are to be avoided at all costs as they tell tales.... I love the killer diagonal as do all the boys and girls.

[Doug Brown]

An excellent image with a good repost job by AM. I would have bumped the ISO to get a bit more DOF; getting the dragonfly in focus would have taken this to the next level.