critique please

https://flic.kr/p/PqKq​jh

Perhaps you should post the photo here. I don't believe most folks would click a blind link. I won't.

I like the light on it.

if you do in fact want to share photos in a thread for easier viewing/critiquing...s​imply click the arrow to the right of the photo, and then copy the BBCode for the 1024 sized photo

as for the photo it looks good, i wish the background wasn't such a similar color to the bird, but not much you can do about that

Technically it appears to be in focus. I might try to boost colors a little bit. Nicely done getting exposure right against sky though at sunset maybe it was dark enough that it was easier. (Always hard to get proper exposure with the extreme backlighting of a bird flying with no trees etc in the background).

That does bring up the problem I have with the photo. There just isn't a lot of interest. It's not a bird portrait because that would be close cropped on bird. I think that if you did that you would lose some sharpness so it wouldn't work. It's not an environmental portrait because it's just sky behind the bird. There is no interesting behavior or color.

I think this photo shows a good job of getting exposure and focus on a flying bird. However to be a great photo it needs more. Of course as I'm saying this I'm thinking about how happy I'd be to have gotten this photo.

Luxx, Very informative. True that nothing interesting is going on shall try to crop closer and see. Wanted to leave some space for bird to fly out.

thanks

anil

It looks like having two dust spots. One above the flying bird, one bellow.

Two rules to know; rule of thirds. never shoot a bird flying away from you.
sometimes rules can be broken. Don't think so in this case.

What were your settings for the shot? EXIF appears to have been stripped off somewhere. I'm going to go out on a limb here, though, and guess that you were shooting a shutter speed lower than your focal length (i.e 1/50s @ 300mm, instead of of 1/400 @ 300mm). There appears to be a marginal amount of camera shake softening the shot a bit.

As someone else mentioned, shooting it going away from you so much is less than ideal, and it sort of looks like your primary focus fell on the feet instead of the head here. Nice job catching the golden light against the stormy backdrop. That's always nice light to get your subject in; but, with a scene like this, you really want to get your subject framed way closer when there's no, real background interest.

Larry Johnson wrote in post #18197452
Two rules to know; rule of thirds. never shoot a bird flying away from you.
sometimes rules can be broken. Don't think so in this case.

Couldn't disagree more. I've gotten many really great pictures with the birds flying away.

new lens and camera... will check.. thank you.

saea501 wrote in post #18197929
Couldn't disagree more. I've gotten many really great pictures with the birds flying away.

Care to share some.

Sure........

It depends on how angled away the bird is. Here, the bird is only very slightly away, almost parallel tbh. In the other flying away example you are losing eye contact and body parts - a "toss" in the bird world, although you could say sometimes rules can be broken but it has to work.

The two things I'd say to work on: more visually appealing backgrounds than just blue sky. Also, top birders are able to capture fine feather detail, with very little post sharpening and noise. You don't want any of the feathers to look like mush.

Take a look at the bird section to give you some inspiration