Greater Racket-tailed Drongo

[Peter Dsouza]

Greater Racket-tailed Drongo | Kabini 2018

One of my favourite birds. Your comments please.

[Prashant Gandhi]

Oh yes! That long tail makes it look unique!
Nice picture.

[Deepak Mistry]

Good framing & eye contact. However too many branches are distracting. Some more inputs on cropping and EXIF data may help the seniors comment on the photo.

[Mrudul Godbole]

Lovely sighting Peter, that too in good light. Liked the catchlight on the eye. Its good that there are no branches blocking the bird. The crest and the swaying tail feathers enhance the composition. Agree with Deepak, please post the EXIF details and the cropping %, to help in commenting. Thanks for sharing.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Cool bird. Nice sighting. Sharing complete details about the image ie shutter speed, aperture, ISO and amount of crop (if any) along with lens and camera will help in visualising and suggesting different approach for your image.

The difference between painters and wildlife photographers is that painters include elements and wildlife photographers exclude elements. One of my earliest lessons was after analysing photos of our treks during college days. Nature is vast. Our eyes are able to comprehend the beauty but the camera can't capture the entire scene in the manner in which we see. Our eyes very easily shift focus and we see the entire scene. Camera has limited depth of field as well as limited dynamic range. So it is important to just isolate interesting patterns and scenes and capture those.

You need to study the angle of the branches. For eg a curved branch would direct our attention span to a certain area and the other part becomes the negative space. Also we need to keep in mind various colours which can distract. In this case the right lower portion (just above your copyright signature) has a reddish colour and that attracts our attention. The elements of a good image directs our attention to the subject.

The branch very close to the drongo's head is also competing for our attention. There is not much space between the two prongs of the branch and the drongo's head. So moving a bit to the left would have helped increase the gap. Ofcourse you were in a vehicle and movement is not easy. But if you can move the vehicle slightly behind then there would be more space and the image may have come out better.

A closer zoom may have helped. In situations like this even if you shoot in f2.8 it would not be possible to isolate the bird from the surroundings. So try a deeper depth of field and get more areas in focus to see if it helps the situation.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi