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Inspiring and Supporting Photographers of Australian Birds

Eastern Spinebill

Photographed by

Andrew McLean in 2020 and uploaded on Sun 22nd Mar, 2020 .

Resolution

1400x933

Viewed

429

39669

Comment

Would like a bit of feed back regarding compostion, colours, whether fill flash is a good or bad
technique, I use Lightroom to for cropping, levels, white balance, saturation and sharpen

Equipment

Canon 5dm4
Canon100400m2
ETTL fill flash godox 860

Location

Dandynong Rangers, Victoria

Keywords

juvenile

This image is not available for download.

Glenn Pure	2020-03-26 09:15:13	Welcome to BLP Andrew and thanks for your request for critique. You've asked for comments on composition, colour and use of fill flash. I'll start with composition. As I don't know whether this is cropped or how much frame there is around the image shown, some of my comments may not apply as you may simply not be able to make the changes suggested. The first thing I'd do is to crop so there is more room on the right side and chop some of the left side. The left is fairly 'busy' at the moment with a significant amount of sharp or near-sharp foliage which is creating a visual distraction from the main subject. Ideally, I'd also have the bird closer to centred vertically but this is going to chop off even more of the flower which I think you've attempted to retain? Still, I think cutting part of it off might still work. I don't know what is below the bird but it may be more in-focus foliage which is going to be somewhat of a visual distraction as the foliage on the left currently is. I do like the softer, more blurred foliage on the left though. Overall, I think the setting here is going to make choosing a composition tricky with trade-offs likely needed. The bird is a good size relative to the overall frame but one thing you could try, if the quality did not suffer too much, is to crop a little harder so the bird was a little bigger in the frame. This might help with the visually distracting part of the surroundings. Regarding colour, this looks fairly natural and accurate to my eye. The red channel may be a little over-saturated looking at the flower colour but perhaps this is how it looked? I can't really comment much further. Use of fill flash can be quite effective and I've done that on rare occasions myself sometimes. However, I'm not really set up for use of flash so don't have a lot of experience. More generally, I'd say the photo does have a 'flashed' look to it, with the point source reflected in the bird's eye (you can clone this spot out if you like) and the underside looking unnaturally bright. By definition, I think fill flash is meant to be subtle and not easily noticeable so that it lifts the shadowed and darker areas a little and brings some detail and definition in to them without brightening them excessively. In this case, I'd say the flash is a little too strong to be called fill flash and is becoming the main source of light for a substantial part of the photo. I'd try experimenting with less flash intensity and this is likely to give more naturally looking lighting while still helping bring definition into the darker and shadowed areas. Hope that helps.
Ian Wilson	2020-03-26 10:12:04	One further point you might like to consider is the highlights on the bird's flank and the hot spot on the shoulder. It looks like there might have been direct sunlight illuminating these areas causing over-exposure. If you are skilled with the use of local adjustment tools in LR you should be able to pull back the brightness of these two areas. Cheers, Ian

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	153/283 in Critique Gallery
	1/13 by Andrew McLean
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	1911/3585 of Honeyeaters and Chats
	18290/34429 Overall
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