This male Kingfisher is confusing me. It's preparing for a breed yes..here there is little mud on it's beak. The Female is very very shy, with the least of movement of the lens it's gone, sometimes with the male too. There is no action yet, the male caught a fish one time (I saw)..but no passing on or mating. Today nothing at all too...I guess I have to hang in there and wait for a little chance. This one is taken last week.
The light is amazing and the details really shine! This image would look much much better as a vertical I think. This would automatically take care of the stick distractions mentioned previously.
If you notice that they are flying off in reaction to your movements, you probably need to back off. You might be interfering with the mating activity you hope to observe.
As for the picture, the colors are real nice and the pose is interesting. Nice BG, but I might work on the "extra" twigs as others have suggested.
Next time I will back off further away, because of the constant low light levels I've tried to work without extender, so I have to be closer..this was one of the oppertunities I got 1/100sec, these days I nearly don't go over 1/50s. I will remove the twiggs probably as I did not cut them before, because all becomes so empty?
Hope for an other pose next time.
Hmmm... There seems to be often nit-picking over distracting elements and the implication of just clone them out. This seems to be a common practice. This gets into a philosophical discussion, perhaps better suited to another thread. Personally, I would not remove any twigs in this image, but I would crop it on the left (and perhaps on the right, making it a vertical frame. I would have tried to do this in the field. I find that in a strong image, the typical viewer (non photographer-critic) will focus on the strong elements, and, if minimized, ignore distractions. I have occasionally asked viewers about a twig in a strong image and the reaction is usually "what twig?" Perhaps photographers are too critical for "the perfect image" and I think this is leading to a mistrust of digital and photoshoped images.
Hi Roger, Those issues are being discussed in several threads on the forum.
I'm all for getting it right in the camera, but sometimes things don't go the way we wish. In this instance, closer, might have been better for framing, etc, however, the camera was already too close as it was changing the behavior of the subject.
I agree on both Roger and Jim :) Thanks for your insights. I am not awake about the twiggs though otherwise I would have already cloned them out. Yeah, closer would be better, but in nature photography you struggle with all kind of things. Here for instance I couldn't use a converter as I would have a too low shutter speed and birds details. Also what Jim already mentioned about keeping a certain distance to it's territory...I could make a tighter crop though, there are still plenty of Megapixels, yeah I would avoid cropping..but often I find many birdphotos too tight.