BIF - Red Kite Calling

[John 2]

More from Loch Kent. Sometimes I go back to shots that I have previously thought were not worth processing. These are two of those. The Red Kite calling was against a bland white sky but I found that there was enough detail in the RAW file to put some colour into it. The left wingtip in the second shot was a mess but I liked the attitude of the bird so I have cropped it. To me, it puts the birds head in a better position in the frame but I know that traditionally, Cropping part of the bird is a definite no no. Comments very welcome.

Nikon D7100
70-300mm Nikkor 300mm
1/1250th f5.6 +1.33 ISO400


Nikon D7100
70-300mm Nikkor 300mm
1/1000th f7.1 +1.33 ISO400

[Shadowman]

Very nice.

[Brownbear]

Very, gorgeous!

[dje]

Great captures John, excellent detail.

Dave

[IzzieK]

Dave beat me to it -- excellent shot! I love both of them but I like #1 best for the eyes and the calling...I could almost hear the sound it made...

[Stagecoach]

Very well captured John and the eyes are spot on.

Grahame

[FrankMi]

Well done John, well done indeed!

I take it that the second one is full frame? If not, is there any more wing tip available?

[Rita]

Excellent captures

[John 2]

Thanks for your comments one and all.
Frank, it's not full frame but as I said in the opening post, the other wing tip was a bit of a mess. The problem was that my eye would go straight to the wing tip because it was so obvious.

[Bobobird]

2 great shots. Well done.

[jamn4ex]

Great bifs!

[chauncey]

Great images...worthy of printing. FWIW...depending on your PP skills adding wing tips is short work.

[John 2]

Thanks BoBo, James and Chauncy. Chauncey, I have enough images to do as you suggest by layering another wing tip on but............

[JJvanDelft]

Beautiful pictures, well done! Need to go back to my bird pictures and process them again.

[NorthernFocus]

A couple of nice shots. Great detail on them both. Regarding the cropped one, sometime you just have to give it a try. The only problem with recovering files like this is that it makes it that much harder to cull in the future

[John 2]

Thanks Jacque, Thanks Dan. You're right Dan and to make it worse, I find that as my PP skills improve, I'm going back to images that I think I can improve on.

[Wavelength]

What a beauty!!!! well done indeed

[chauncey]

John...I'm a bit puzzled as to why you earlier relegated those to the "don't bother with" file considering that they are both good images.

[John 2]

Hi Chauncey. I guess it's that if I am reviewing what in this case must have been 50+ images, I tend to look for the easiest to do something with. It's only in retrospect that I tried to do something with these. To give you some idea of the initial impact, below is the original of the Red Kite Calling image. The sky is in there somewhere but it took a lot of work in Adobe RAW and CS6 to liberate it - and I have to confess that even then I added a graduated saturation layer over the sky to give it some form. The bird however is very sharp and so I thought it worth the effort. I have found a third image similar to the second but I think that I can include both wing tips. I might just process that and post it at some stage.

[chauncey]

This link will help show what can be done with LR and ACR, which has the same algorithms...http://photography-on-the.net/forum/...d.php?t=684360