(If backgrounds have been removed, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
An alert look and a very nice BG. I love the curve of the perch. I wonder about adding a little more canvas on the left, but that’s a minor point, as the perch balances the bird so nicely. It looks as though noise reduction has been a bit more than needed. If you did it on a duplicate layer, you might consider reducing the opacity of that layer a bit.
Beautiful capture John Wayne. I am not sure if I would change anything, I might try toning the highlights down and see how that does although very little. Birds are jumpy so I am not sure how long he let you setup the shot, but it did well
A lovely bright photo of the woodpecker. A really nice pose of the bird on a dandy perch. I also wonder about a bit more room for the bird to look into. The bird does seem sharp but something appears to interfere with the fine detail. It is an eye catching photo.
Lovely portrait against a nice background, John.
I’m going to offer a different suggestion for the crop/composition. I understand that from a classical perspective we might want more room to the left of the woodpecker because it’s looking in that direction. The problem I find is that the (very nice, IMO) undulating branch going up behind it is offering too much counterweight. No matter how much real estate you add to the left, the eye will still be drawn to the right by that branch.
So for me, you take advantage of the graphical nature of the image: everything is focused on the shape of the bird and line of the branch. I’d actually try to emphasize that combination even more by cropping a little more off the left and maybe a sliver from the bottom. I think that would provide better balance to the two objects.
Max
A beautiful pose and perch, Wayne, and the exposure looks great. To my eye, it looks like this is a bit overprocessed. There’s little fine feather detail and there are fringes all around both the bird and the perch. Often these are produced by a slightly heavy hand on the noise reduction followed by trying to bring the detail back with sharpening. Given that you took this at iso 3200, I wouldn’t be surprised at having a lot of noise in the original to deal with.
Thanks to all, I appreciate all of your kind comments. I have been trying to rely less on Topaz .
I think there’s better balance in the repost, John.
Max
I agree. It does feel better. Subtle and counter intuitive change makes a nice difference.
Lovely shot, and surprised at the image quality with such a high ISO, job well done on exposure. I like the repost a bit better as well. Cheers, Hans
