The Kaka is a forest parrot with a fairly dull colouration and a long curved beak. It has a distinctive pale crown and crimson/rust underwings, rump and collar. The North Island subspecies is mainly olive-brown in colour, with darker feather edges and a grey, pale crown. This species is endemic to New Zealand.
Kari1, KiwiNick, Francie and I spent an afternoon and evening in the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary where some extremely rare and endangered species have been gathered in their natural habitat.
Kari1 had the 'big' camera (it was her turn) and so I got out the 1.3 megapixel Kodak P&S. It turned out to be the Little Camera That Could. The Kaka were at a feeding station so it was a good place to sit quietly and wait. The trouble is, if you've ever used one of these cameras, they're super wide angle so I was forced to stalk this bird sitting in the branch. I must have been only 6 feet from it when it took flight and I reflex-shot it.
Karori Wildlife Sanctuary - A world-first
A predator-proof fence, specifically designed to exclude 14 species of non-native mammals, ranging from possums to mice, encircles the 8.6km perimeter.
Many species of threatened native wildlife are introduced. The little spotted kiwi - one of our rarer kiwi - has already been released. So too has the Tuatara, the only surviving dinosaur period species on the planet.
The Sanctuary is developed as a major education, research and recreational site for the benefit of all.
Post Processing:- Very little, this is only a 1.3 megapixel file and I have cropped about 25% out. Some brightness, a little contrast and USM
Statistics
Place: 191 out of 261 Avg (all users): 5.0375 Avg (commenters): 5.7273 Avg (participants): 4.9558 Avg (non-participants): 5.0821 Views since voting: 1022 Views during voting: 402 Votes: 320 Comments: 13 Favorites: 0
Hi, as requested, here is an in-depth critique of your submission.
First Impression - the most important one:
This a very good capture of this bird in flight. Nice action shot.
Composition:
Not as strong as it could be. The most distracting part of the composition is that the bird has nowhere to fly. Objects in motion in a composition need room to continue their path. Another composition flaw that this is creating is that the wing cuts the image almost directly in half, violating the Rule of Thirds.
Subject:
Subject is nice and well defined by light level differences. I’d like to see a bit less DoF, but I see this was shot with a P&S camera, so that expectation is hard to meet. Overall, though subject is good.
Technical (Color, focus, and light):
Focus is sharp and detail is clear.
Color – It’s ok, but may have been washed out a bit due to a bit too much flash. Maybe boosting saturation in Post-processing would help.
Light – a bit too much flash, but overall lighting is good.
To grow its vote?:
Not entirely sure this convinced the voters that the bird was wild. A bit less crop might have convinced them, but I’m not sure how well that would have worked either.
Summary:
Nice action shot, needs a bit of work on composition, but overall was a nice capture.
I didn't even realise it was your shot and I scored you a 7. I liked it, agree with the other comments about the flash, but what can you do with a smaller camera, I think it came out well!
The main subject looks out of focus and there is too much contrast due to flash lighting. The bird eye is reflecting green or amber from the flash which is as bad as red-eye. While there is some interest in seeing the subject frozen in flight there is just too much quality lost as a result of flash, IMO. From a photo of the same subject that I viewed prior to this, that also suffered from flash lighting, I get the idea that this subject is in a very low-light environment and difficult to capture.
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