Hawk and snake - critique please

Here is my hawk and snake, looking for feedback

awesome capture. Looks to be just a tick out of focus. Focus seems to be on the talon or flank instead of head/eye. Maybe crop out a little behind the red-shouldered hawk. Love the background cause it's not just a blue sky.
I suggest to crank up the shutter speed.

shutter was 1/2000 f/5.6 ISO 250 I could have gone to 1/3000 or higher and the 90D can handle up to ISO 1600 without too much loss. My 100-400Lii widest F stop is 5.6 so have to do it with speed and iso.

I dropped it back into photoshop and toned down the talon a smidge to with the blur tool to make it less glaring was worried about the background being not out of focus enough or too busy but that may well depend on the judge it gets...

It's a winner.

Jeff USN Photog 72-76 wrote in post #19293427
Here is my hawk and snake, looking for feedback

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Jeff I'd be really proud of a photo like that, full of action and interest. The background is a bit busy, reducing subject separation from it, but for a spontaneous shot like that it's hard to arrange it differently (i.e. to have the background further away and therefore more blurry). The subject does, however, appear to have some fairly severe sharpening haloes. Can I suggest you look into different ways of sharpening images? Topaz Sharpen AI does a pretty good job but there are a variety methods in Photoshop that you could use to sharpen while minimising haloes. Andy Astbury has some useful videos on sharpening wildlife photos without haloes.

I frequently use my 90D at ISO 6400 if I need to keep the shutter speed up at lower light levels. I don't believe it's as noisy as some claim and its noise is easily cleaned up by Topaz Denoise AI without losing too much detail. It is important, though (as with any digital camera), to get the exposure right, i.e. as far to the right of the histogram as possible without clipping.

For bird photography with the camera/lens combo you've used, I normally use f/7.1. It's slightly sharper than wide open and gives you a bit more depth of field for the subject. Backgrounds will of course be slightly less blurry but blurry backgrounds are more more about distance behind subject than about f-stops.

Good luck with it.

Pippan
Here is the shot just before the Hawk above. The one above is a bit overdone with sharpening. Here are the two before any work on them. I will be spending some time with them this week the other one was also cropped this severely

The one with the reeds in the background (above) the background is a bit too busy.

Here is the original hawk cropped but before I used AI Denoise on the hawk to smooth and sharpen, and before blurring the background a bit. The hawk is a bit soft but less oversharpened like the OP. I will try and try and try to get one of these to be a winner

Thanks, I didn't realise it had been so severely cropped. Maybe Denoise has produced those sharpening haloes because they look a lot less on the second version you posted. If it were my photo I'd reduce the contrast a bit (contrast kills fine detail) and compose it so the bird's eye is in the horizontal centre of the image, giving more space for the bird to 'fly into' the frame.

I will try that, horizontal on the eye. I know a lot of people who wouldn't have taken the shot because it was so far away, about 130 yards, I will work on the original again knowing what I do now and see what I can get

so I went back to the original, when I processed the first time I used AI Denoise on the entire image, this time I did it in two steps, first used AI Denoise with low noise removal and med sharpening on the hawk and then did another mask and used Denoise to remove noise but no sharpening on the background. I also toned down some of the highlights on the background and straightened the overall image, trees in background are now vertical and it makes the head more horizontal. This is about the best I can do at least for now.

Jeff USN Photog 72-76 wrote in post #19294310
so I went back to the original, when I processed the first time I used AI Denoise on the entire image, this time I did it in two steps, first used AI Denoise with low noise removal and med sharpening on the hawk and then did another mask and used Denoise to remove noise but no sharpening on the background. I also toned down some of the highlights on the background and straightened the overall image, trees in background are now vertical and it makes the head more horizontal. This is about the best I can do at least for now.

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I think it's looking a lot better (but I'm not a judge). Can you just sharpen the hawk's eye up, maybe using the radial filter in Lightroom?

Like the subject... the background just distracts. You can deal with it in several ways. Difuse it more. Or isolate the subject by enhancing its color so it pops out. Way over simplified... but that its. Its a really cool subject.

Jeff USN Photog 72-76 wrote in post #19294175
Pippan
Here is the shot just before the Hawk above. The one above is a bit overdone with sharpening. Here are the two before any work on them. I will be spending some time with them this week the other one was also cropped this severely

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This one is a great capture but just slightly oversaturated