Bird of Paradise
by Cub

Comment by Silver Fox:
Lovely photo of the bird. The various grey's come out really nice as does his eye and beak, but the background just seems to be too cluttered.

Bird of Paradise
by Cub

Comment by PTLParsons:
Ohhhhhh. It hurts that you cropped him up. I love the photo, but all of it. I find myself scrolling down to see the rest of the photo. I'm not kidding. What you have is nice, just not enough of it. With all of it I could have even overlooked the too soft of focus on the plant. I personally think it should have been sharper. But that's just me, like the Whole bird thing. It's still a nice photo, though.

Bird of Paradise
by Cub

Comment by kellie:
different but good

Bird of Paradise
by Cub

Comment by sher:
good work...nice focus on the bird's eye.

Bird of Paradise
by Cub

Comment by dadas115:
I think this would have been better if there was a little less DOF and a little more USM. I don’t like how the plant looks like it is growing out of the bird.

Greg

Bird of Paradise
by Cub

Comment by pstuhr:
I would have rated this much higher, but you committed the ultimate "portrait sin" by having the background plant appear to pop out of the subject. If this was intended, you should have a least positioned the beak and head away from the plant to provide focus. I do like the color and tones though.

Bird of Paradise
by Cub

Comment by Paulk:
I think cropping much tighter would improve the score

Bird of Paradise
by Cub

Comment by Refracted:
I like the colors and DOF, but i feel like i'm drawn to seeing more of the bird but then he seems cut a bit short.

Sweet Inspiration
by Cub

Comment by Azrifel:
~~~~Critique Club Comment~~~~

Composition (content)
First of all my apologies. I didn't see the relation between the sign and the background during the challenge, I just saw a sign with an ungly factory ruining the background. But now that I read your comment and have looked a bit better for this critique it was so obvious. :)

As soon as you see/know the relationship the telephone cables and stuff are just some background noise, shame that they are there, but not to big of a problem.

There are not too many ways to get the sign and its background relation into the same frame, so I think you did a good job on this. The sign's perspective points to the sugar mill and the horizon is in a nice position. The use of the small aperture creates enough depth of focus to get everytink in focus in the frame. The weather may be bad, but it has created an very balance lighting of the whole scene with natural colors, but without nasty shadows.

It is just that the sugar mill itself is ugly and seems like industrial waste in a mountain landscape.

Background
See composition. The sharpness of the hill is very nice.

Camera Work (Technical)
Good focus, sharpness & exposure. No comments.

Digital Processing (technical)
Color balance looks good, sharpness as well.
The filesize has some room for saving the pic at a higher quality. It isn't very noticible here because a good algoritm is used, but a higher qualitye (close to 150kb in filesize) can save edge sharpness and the representation of contrastnoisy patches like the mud in the foreground.

My opinion
Now that I know the relation: very cool.
But the subject isn't so beautiful. :)
Good eye, original!

Sweet Inspiration
by Cub

Comment by Cub:
I'm sure the cables killed me here, but they were unavoidable for the image I was trying to display. Thanks for the votes and the comments. Keep up the flame! Cub