Roller (Coracias garrulus)

[Juan Aragonés]

Another image from my weekend photographying bustards, rollers and lesser kestrels in Extremadura.
This guy is a male. Comments and critics are apreciated

Nikon D2X AFS Nikkor 300VR+1,4XTC tripod and WH, 1/500s f5,6 -0,7EV ISO 160

[Doug Brown]

I love the way the sun reveals all the detail in the eye Juan! DOF is perfect; sharp from eye to tail with a smooth BG. I might crop a little off the left and also a tad from the bottom.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Beautiful bird, nice and sharp and the colours are quite beautifu! Wish the bird was placed more at left of frame. Also, I could be wrong, but the BG has an obvious gaussian blur effect applied to it...if not then to me it looks overly smooth for some reason.

[Juan Aragonés]

Beautiful bird, nice and sharp and the colours are quite beautifu! Wish the bird was placed more at left of frame. Also, I could be wrong, but the BG has an obvious gaussian blur effect applied to it...if not then to me it looks overly smooth for some reason.

Daniel you are right about the gaussian effect. Here is very obvious but I am surprised with the result because I try to apply GB in little amounts to avoid odd results, and always use this filter with large files. I have found that the same amount of GB have a very different impact on a large file than on an small one.

This is a large file and I used a small amount of GB to improve noise reduction on the background but for some reason that I do not understand, the result seems very close to the one produced by a large amount of GB on a small file :confused: I have to say that this is the filter that, IMO, produces most unpredictable results on my files and I am not very happy using it so any tips for using it are highly appreciated ;)

Here is a repost with less room at the left and bottom and a minimum amount of GB to the background with a detail of the same crop from the original RAW file without GB, sharpening or color correction.

[Manos Papadomanolakis]

I really like the head turn,eye contact and details,agree for a bit crop on the left side

[Michael Menefee]

It's a nice angle here on the face and great PP on the color. I'm not sure on the bokeh either, it's nice but a bit too much gb maybe. But really a great capture of a bird I would love to photograph myself someday.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Juan, I much prefer your repost...very natural looking this time! As for gaussian blur tips, I haven't used that tool enough to know. Is there not a preview pane to look at while working with that? Again, beautiful bird!! :-)