Verdin Drinking Sap 2

A belated welcome to NPN Eirini! This is a really neat behavioral shot, nice job getting this close to the bird. I can see why you have centered the bird with the nice palo verde that he is attached to but I might just crop a little bit more from the right. I´m looking forward to seeing more of your work.

what a great moment, it can hurt.......

Wonderful shot! Great moment and interesting pose!

D&L

A great position you caught this bird in Eirini. For me there is too much of the tree on the left showing and it makes the image to heavy on the left for my taste. I might try a more verticle comp with a lot less tree. That will emphasize the bird and the nice BG IMO.

Eirini, I agree with Ron and would take some off the tree trunk on the left and a little off the right to center the bird. The pose is great and I would center it.

Love the pose and POV here Eirini, excellent details in the LP.
I agree with Nate about a bit off the right side since the bird's facing left.
Nicely done & welcome!

Nice timing for this shot. I'd try this as a square crop to eliminate the out of focus left side of the tree and extra space on the right.

Very cool image, Eirini. The detail on the face looks fine to me. I might think about playing with the composition. The large oof portion of the trunk seems a bit obtrusive. I think a vertical comp with about 1/3 as much trunk might work better. Excellent image.

The problem with this photo is that it is almost full frame, which means there is not a lot to work with! Richard Ditch suggested making it a square...here goes!

Here is the vertical version which I think works better as well (as advised by Dennis Plank)...only then my crop is less than 50% of the original! Is that still acceptable? Thanks for all the input everyone!

Both reposts work well by eliminating uninteresting space and concentrating on the position of the Verdin. Although I don't recommend excessive cropping and personally try to avoid crops of more than 50% sometimes the image just works better that way. If you start with a very high quality original (focus and exposure spot on) you can get away with a larger crop at times.

Great pose! I prefer each of your reposts over the original. To know which one of them I'd go with I'd have to see it in a larger version (which you can't do now) to assess IQ. Regarding composition only I prefer your second repost. Nice capture.

I like the vertical repost a lot, Eirini. With the 5D, that kind of crop is still more than enough pixels for web presentation if the image is well focused to start with. It does limit blowing it up, but cropping from a horizontal to a vertical presentation is pretty standard and with teh pixels available now you could still get a pretty decent sized print out of it.

Great action - love the position of the feet.
May

An interesting Verdin image, I have never seen them going after Palo Verde tree sap before, although they do like to try and get in our hummer feeders. I like the last vertical crop the best as you eliminate most of the OOF tree, nice job in getting this show, well done.

This is a split. What a catch.