We often find a Coopers Hawk lurking over our bird feeders just off our patio.
Specific Feedback Requested
Just looking for general thoughts on this image
Technical Details
F6.3, 1/1000, ISO 800, 600mm
Canon 5d, mark iii
Tamron 150-600
Handheld
Hi Terry, the side light really light’s up this bird’s eye on the left of the image and it’s great to see the red coloration so well. I like the background especially in the top of the image. Looks like the hawks we have in our yard waiting at the songbird feeders. Nice portrait.
A beautiful shot of the Cooper’s, Terry. I like the side lighting, though I think you could bring the highlights on the right side of the face down a trifle. You don’t mention what software you use for processing, but I find that the local adjustment brush in LightRoom works wonderfully for that kind of thing. I also notice some minor cloning artifacts where the brush you used on the background impinged on the perch a little bit. It’s only noticeable to someone looking for it, so it’s not a big deal. The easiest way I’ve found to deal with that it to select the bird and perch and either copy it to another layer or do an inverted selection before you start cloning so nothing can affect the subject.
A nice static portrait of the Coopers. The side lighting worked pretty well, but I think there’s more to be had from the light side and the darker side.
My first impression of the image however was that the background looks really odd. Some pretty obvious cloning and I’m guessing the background didn’t look much like this out of the camera. There is also some odd blurring / not blurred stuff going on at the bottom of the frame with the larger branch and the small branch coming off the larger branch. One is very blurred while the other is pretty sharp, yet they are in the same focal plane.