Hi Deanna,
I have to agree with you, this is a very lovely photograph of a bee-eater. Now, as I have mentioned on this site before, I am not an expert on bird photography and so I will not pretend speak with much authority on the subject. What I can tell you about though is that in the circumstances I think you have achieved a good photograph.
There are a couple of improvements that you could make to this photo.
The first of them is to the contrast of the image; at the moment the photo seems a bit flat. If you go to the Curves panel in the program you are using you might be surprised to discover that the histogram is very “Bell” shaped and that the edge of the graph is not really connecting with the white or black points of the picture. If you pull the edge of the curves line into the foot of the graph on each side you will see that the image takes on more life.
As for the second adjustment… this is where we get clever.
If you look at the image you cannot help but feel that there is quite a bit of space between the three design elements of the picture, namely the bird and the leaves in the left and right of the frame. To make this look better I am going to suggest closing up this gap using a clever piece of software made by the Adobe team call “Content Aware Scaling”.
Open the image and then duplicate the Background layer. Then with this new layer, go into the Edit menu and select Content Aware Scaling. Now, grab the side of the picture and start pulling it across like you were making a crop. What you will notice is that while the image gets narrower, the actual bird and the leaves maintain their correct proportions! Amazing stuff.
In the image below I have adjusted the curves and applied content aware scaling… I think the resulting image does not look too bad!
All the best with your next bird photography expedition.
Cheers,
Anthony
Image Doctor's edited version
