Robin Red Breast C&C is welcome

[seakritter]

Was visiting with a customer and their holly trees were being raided, grabbed my camera and snapped a couple shots, I hope you like them.

 

[WesternGuy]

I really like the first one - bit of an action shot. It is too bad that the leaves of the plants obscure the "rear-end", but you have to take what you can get.

WesternGuy

 

[LinkTheWorld]

Yes, I really like the first shot. Maybe even one with a tighter crop. Very good for an on the fly picture.

 

[seakritter]

I really like the first one - bit of an action shot. It is too bad that the leaves of the plants obscure the "rear-end", but you have to take what you can get.

WesternGuy

Thank so much, they were tough to get them to sit still, every time I raised my camera to shot they would move, the little beggars , I only managed about 5 shots.

 

[seakritter]

Yes, I really like the first shot. Maybe even one with a tighter crop. Very good for an on the fly picture.

Thank for your kind words.

 

[KABfoto]

I like the behavior of the first shot. Anytime you can take a shot of wildlife actually doing something interesting or behavioral...it always makes it better.

With that said, here are a couple tips if you don't mind. I have others, but I don't want to over complicate your next attempt. One of the most important things to me when shooting wildlife, is getting the subject to pop and eliminate most of the scene which can distract the viewer for what is happening. So a good rule of thumb is to look for a clean background. In both of your images, you have a lot of leaves and branches which compete for attention in the scene. My second tip is make sure of your focal point. On the first image, your focal point seems to be on the berry at the bottom of the birds feet and because of this, the eye is a bit soft. You can eliminate some of this by using a smaller AP to extend your DOF, but then you are possibly introducing more detail from the background that you don't want. The eye is always one of the most important things to have sharp in most any wildlife image. Like I said, there are many other things, but hopefully this will give you a couple of things to work on for your next image to make even further improvements.

 

[seakritter]

I like the behavior of the first shot. Anytime you can take a shot of wildlife actually doing something interesting or behavioral...it always makes it better.

With that said, here are a couple tips if you don't mind. I have others, but I don't want to over complicate your next attempt. One of the most important things to me when shooting wildlife, is getting the subject to pop and eliminate most of the scene which can distract the viewer for what is happening. So a good rule of thumb is to look for a clean background. In both of your images, you have a lot of leaves and branches which compete for attention in the scene. My second tip is make sure of your focal point. On the first image, your focal point seems to be on the berry at the bottom of the birds feet and because of this, the eye is a bit soft. You can eliminate some of this by using a smaller AP to extend your DOF, but then you are possibly introducing more detail from the background that you don't want. The eye is always one of the most important things to have sharp in most any wildlife image. Like I said, there are many other things, but hopefully this will give you a couple of things to work on for your next image to make even further improvements.

Thank good all good points, the eye is a bit soft, yet you can see the birds tongue go figure, lol, I do see what your talking about, it was a quick shot, I was using AF spot focus, didn't have the time to MF, they moving so fast. I did manually set the F/S, I do try to shot wild life with a fairly tight DOF, leaving enough to show the environment, yet not take too much from the subject.