Bluebirds- Live Bait

Image Critiques Everything Else Critiques
1

These Western Bluebirds have been coming in for live mealworms for some time. We’ve been adopted the practice of feeding the adults when they’re feeding young and the fledglings so they’re trained to come for food in the case of a major winter weather event. The Bluebirds in this area overwinter here which is normally not a problem, but if we get a heavy snow and particularly if it gets covered with ice, we can lose most of them in a week (it happened the first winter after we finally had a pair nesting on the property).

These fledglings are almost at the point of being weaned. Today, they were feeding themselves most of the time.

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What technical feedback would you like if any?

Anything. I added some canvas on the right and top and took a bit away on the left and bottom. Other than that, normal adjustments and a couple of tiny clones were about it.

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

How’s the composition? I debated taking some more off the left and adding more on the right.

Any pertinent technical details:

Sony A6500, Canon EF300 F/4L & 1.4 TC, hand held, manual focus using the focus peaking feature of the Sony, f/8, 1/100, iso 2000, aperture priority, spot metering. Processed in LR & PS CC. NeatImage for noise reduction. This ended up being just a very slight crop with the adjustments I made. Taken June 4th at 5:30 am with a bit of fog (no sun yet).

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2

Great family portrait, Dennis. I was surprised to see that your shutter speed was only 1/100th, with birds as the subject! They don’t usually sit still for very long. The only movement I detect, is the beak of the baby on the left, and I think that actually adds to the story, as he has his mouth open like he is calling out to be fed. Nicely done.

3

Thanks, Shirley. They’ve got me trained to feed them pre-dawn. I need to get them to wait another 1/2 hour until I get some light. We’re supposed to have some sunny days coming up this week, so if we don’t have too much morning fog, I might manage some shots in decent light.

4

This is up there with your more recent post, Dennis. Having the trio, each bird with a different pose, works extremely well. On your point about the L side crop and R side extension - I think that might be slightly stronger.