solitary

Nice work Sam!  Since the bird is facing to the left of the image you might want to consider adding more negative space to that side and cropping the right side to remove the branch which I believe detract more than adds to the image.  Only a suggestion since you asked. ;)

A beautiful cormorant in an elegant pose! The shaded bottom of the bird is a bit unfortunate but obviously cant be helped if it wasnt moving on its perch. I agree with John that cropping out the branch on the right would improve the composition, although if the original had more free space on the right then it might also be interesting to include the entire empty branch uncropped.

The blue sky looks fairly noisy on my monitor, that could be an artefact from the upload to PN rather than your own jpeg, but either way a simple trick to minimize that is to select/mask all the blue sky and overlay it with a semitransparent layer of an even blue color value picked from among the original sky tones.

PDE

John, Paul and Pierre,

thank you very much for your well-thought over suggestions, comments & enthusiastic support.

Cheers!

Sam.