AGeoJO Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Hi Robert,
I like the target and composition a lot. A great image but since you were asking some C/C, well, here it goes.
I do think that the flash output was on the high side, for my taste by 1-stop or maybe even by 2-stop. This is a matter of taste and as such, it is subjective and it is strictly my opinion and I understand that your mileage or other people's mileage may vary. It seems to me that the hawk looked overexposed on the original RAW file and you decrease the total exposure using LR. So, the exposure on the hawk looks OK now but the background looks a tad underexposed. You can tone down the highlight in LR while keeping the rest roughly the same. But if you do too much of that, you can get some halo effect at the boundary of dark/light areas.
I firmly believe that flash should be used for fill-in and not the dominant light source for wildlife, at least most of the time. Of course, there will be situation that you want to use the flash power as the dominant/main light source but IMHO, it is not the case here.
I was out and about earlier and I used my iPad to easily enlarge the image and I did it back and forth. From what I could gather, it is possible that the camera/lens combo shows a little bit of a back focus issue, at least in this case. The beak of the hawk is definitely blurrier than the feathers, especially of the tail feathers. For all we know the actual focusing plane fell even behind the tail feather by a smidgen, rendering the hawk out of focus with the beak showing the most OOF area. What was or where was your focusing point, BTW?
I hope this helps and feel free to send me a PM if you want to discuss this further, like what we have been doing.
Take care,
Joshua
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