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Inspiring and Supporting Photographers of Australian Birds

Sacred Kingfisher

Photographed by

Robyn Elliott on Fri 5th Feb, 2021 and uploaded on Sun 7th Mar, 2021 .

Resolution

1800x1440

Viewed

785

45203

Comment

I love the overall composition, the background and the engagement of the bird, however I am worried about the white highlighting on the wing and back feathers. The photo was taken in morning light at around 7:30 am.

Equipment

Canon EOS R, sigma 150-600mm Contemporay F7.1, SS 1/640, ISO 2000

Location

Fernvale, Queensland

Keywords

adult

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Glenn Pure	2021-03-11 10:54:33	Hi Robyn, I agree that the pose of the bird and composition works well in this shot. Kingfishers are so photogenic and popular too, which helps. Regarding composition, my preference would actually be to crop a little less tightly than you have so there is a little more room above and below the bird, although that is a personal preference and the shot does work fairly well as presented. The other composition issue is that I would move the bird a little closer to the centre (but not into the middle of photo) to better balance the negative space on the left and right. I wouldn't change it much though. The main issues for me with this shot are technical. First, it looks like you may have cropped fairly hard to get this as the detail is starting to break up: this is quite a common issue. The photo is well focussed and sharp but if I start looking for the fine feather detail, say on the underside of the bird, I see more digital noise than detail. The same on the back of the bird. Even though there is feather detail present, it is breaking up and not well resolved. These are typical symptoms of cropping hard. It's worth including details like this when you post for critique. I also agree with your comment on the blown highlights on the back of the bird particularly: areas that are white or very light and lacking any feather detail at all. If you have taken your photo in RAW file format, you should be able to recover this detail in processing. However, if you have recorded a jpg in camera, there is little that can be done to get this detail (the RAW file contains a lot more tonal information, much of which requires some adjustments in processing the RAW file to bring out). This shot also shows some mild chromatic aberration. You might be wondering what this is? It is the strange coloured fringing around some parts. An example is the tail where the boundary on the left side with the background shows a sharp reddish line. This is caused by the camera lens and is inherent in most lenses but can sometimes be fixed with software during processing. Overall the colour looks quite strong in this shot and if mine, I'd be inclined to reduce the colour saturation so the colours looked a little closer to natural. You will also see some odd colour casts on the white areas of the bird and perch. This may be due to light reflected off non-white objects surrounding the bird or could mean the white balance is incorrect. It's hard to be sure. Either way, both of these can again be fixed in processing. If you are interested in what is involved in doing all of this 'processing' I have made a couple of videos which you will find on our website under 'Resources: Video Tuitorials'. You will need to be logged in to see them. There is one on using Canon DPP for RAW processing but the process will be very similar no matter what RAW processor you are using. Likewise, there is a video on taking the output from RAW processing and working on this in Photoshop Elements. Again, while the details are specific to Photoshop Elements, the types of things you will need to do will be the same or similar in any photo processing software. I hope that helps.
Robyn Elliott	2021-03-12 14:21:51	--HI Glen, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. I have revisited the raw file and it seems that unfortunately, the highlights are not recoverable. The photo did have a fair bit of cropping, and I can see now how that degrades the quality. I think I need to work on getting closer to the bird to try and avoid this.

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	198/283 in Critique Gallery
	1/31 by Robyn Elliott
	107/170 of Sacred Kingfisher
	395/677 of Kingfishers
	21420/34446 Overall
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