Sunbird

[davidc]

I think this might be a candidate for Nature exhibitions so critique to help me improve it would be appreciated. I think I've covered the basics but I spent hours on it yesterday, I might be missing something obvious

exif
Canon 6D + Tamron 150-500 @ 500mm
iso 800
f8
1/500th sec


32. Sunbird by cedarsphoto, on Flickr

[Paul Heester]

Those colours really have some punch! That was the first impression, however I really like the composition as well. The large bud pointing in one direction and the bird's nose pointing in the other complements the scene nicely. The OOF background without any distracting elements is another plus point. Im slightly distracted by the dirt on the bud, although Im notsure how "ethical" it would be to remove that. Id also image a judge wanting a bit more space in the bottom right to balance the scene a tad more. Overall another cracking shot

[davidc]

Cheers for the feedback!

I have no qualms about removing the dirt on the flower, I already have removed one speck near the bird's feet because it looked odd. I'll clone out the rest of the grit. Standard nature rules usually don't mind moderate amounts of cleanup, it's more wholesale fabrication that's the issue.

The space on the bottom right was something I had considered. The original shot does have the capacity to add a bit more room but Farley's Rule Of Cropping was foremost in my mind and I went as tight as seemed reasonable - the main reason for the right hand crop is because dragging it out increased the space on the bottom left too and I found the big, empty left hand space more annoying than the relative "tightness" on the right.

Thank you!

[davidc]

Bah now you've said it the grit is all I'm looking at
Easily fixed though, thanks again

[Mike Farley]

..... Farley's Rule Of Cropping was foremost in my mind and I went as tight as seemed reasonable .......

That Farley is the scourge of everything.

The picture seems to have been taken down from flickr, so what I am about to say is from memory, with all the caveats that implies.

I agree with Paul's comments about the cropping at the bottom right, which is a bit tight even for me. I understand the concerns about creating the empty space at bottom left and I was wondering whether a bit of anti-clockwise rotation would help and also provide stronger diagonals. My initial impression was that I found the way that the bird is holding its head looks a bit odd, even if that is its natural behaviour, but something else was troubling me and it has taken a while to work out what is wrong. The bird might have been moving and only there momentarily, but it does look a bit static and fails to hold interest. For me, ultimately it fails both in the visual art and nature categories. In regards to the latter, wildlife photography has become so good is that a straight depiction of the subject is no longer enough and nowadays we expect a narrative about what the creature is doing. It's far from being a bad shot, the opposite in fact, but I would have liked a bit more.

Thanks for posting and I hope you find my critique useful.

[davidc]

I uploaded a copy with the grit that Paul had mentioned cloned out - I've now updated the broken link.

Thanks for the feedback. Diagonal rotation wasn't something I tried, I will have a look. I was trying to keep fundamental changes to the scene to a minimum though so it never crossed my mind

Curious about the static comment, do you mean I should have used a shot with some motion blur to imply movement?
I picked this shot because the way the bird is just hanging tenuously off a petal was quite dynamic and compositionally worked well with the banana flower.

Anyway, I thought the only hard and fast nature rule was that it had to show the whole animal and not be only a portrait, unless it's a lion because the judges love lions

I'll bear the feedback in mind, thank you!

[Nina]

Hi David

I thought I'd add my first reaction. I agree with most that has been said and think that you have a cracker here. However the banana flower is rendered much better than the bird and I can understand the reasons why. One thing I would have tried is to flip the image horizontally so it reads left to right as it were. This may improve the composition. Good luck!

[Mike Farley]

I uploaded a copy with the grit that Paul had mentioned cloned out - I've now updated the broken link.

Correcting the issues Paul noted has made a definite improvement. I would have preferred you to leave the original in place to allow a comparison between the before and after images.

Curious about the static comment, do you mean I should have used a shot with some motion blur to imply movement?
I picked this shot because the way the bird is just hanging tenuously off a petal was quite dynamic and compositionally worked well with the banana flower.

What I meant by static is that there is little action going on within the scene. Essentially it is just a bird on a flower, although it has turned its head which does help. If you think about the best nature shots where an animal is the subject, they are often doing something rather than simply sitting around. Think penguins swimming underwater or a wolf leaping over a gate (oops, scratch that last one, it was disqualified for being staged ). Would your image have been a better (and harder to achieve) shot if you had captured the bird flying onto the flower, for example?

This is a good effort which I would expect to do reasonably* well in club competition, but if you have higher ambitions it might well fall short. Despite the difficulty involved, the standard of nature work is high and there are some stunning images out there.

One other thing, which I noticed originally but did not recall when I posted my critique from memory after you deleted the original, is that there are some highlights on the top of the banana flower which could usefully be toned down.

I'll bear the feedback in mind, thank you!

Always happy to help.

* Judge dependent.

[Mike Farley]

One thing I would have tried is to flip the image horizontally so it reads left to right as it were. This may improve the composition. Good luck!

I am not sure this would help. Bearing in mind that the eye scans an image from top left to bottom right*, the bird would be looking out of the shot to the right, so the eye will naurally follow its gaze and go out of the image. With the bird looking to the left, the eye's natural left to right progression will bring it back into the shot.

* In western cultures where we read from left to right, at least. Thanks to ground breaking research** conducted right here on this forum, there is some evidence that the opposite occurs where people read right to left. A while back, I met someone born in this country of Japanese parents, but who had learnt only English, not Japanese. He said that he naturally scanned from left to right, suggesting that the effect is cultural rather than genetic. I have no idea what would happen where someone natively reads both languages.

** Seriously. Human perception has only been investigated in the western world and I can find no findings where there has been consideration of other cultures. davidc conducted an experiment in a multi-cultural office where he was working at the time, which might just be the only study undertaken on the topic. Proper researchers might shudder at the non scientific methods used, in which case I can only suggest that they set up experiments under controlled conditions to establish a definitive answer.