Juvenile osprey learning to fly

Excellent light, flight pose and detail, Diane!

Awesome flight pose. I would darken the mid-tones a bit.

Nice pose. Looks like a pretty clean young bird! Fledglings I see usually look ratty from hanging out in the nest. Also young juvies tend to have red eyes, but I am not sure when that changes out.
Great detail in the bird that might benefit from a bump in clarity/midtones (as above).

Diane
A nice one for your collection. The experts have spoken and I would agree with the mid-tones....but also a nice background story...except for the death


Graeme

Excellent flight pose. Beautiful details

Excellent catch..I agree with others regarding darkening the mid tone

fantastic dancing pose in sky , beautiful image .

Wow

Great photo. Thank you for sharing the back story of the Osprey fledglings.

A pleasure to view.

Thanks everyone! You're right about the mid-tones -- I was a little too taken with the initial "unusual" look. Will post a re-try asap.

Hmmm... a quandary on this image -- if anyone is still following. I thought a Clarity adjustment in LR might be worth a try but it only gave a slight desaturation. Then tried a High Pass "sharpening." It just just did the usual pseudo-sharpening.

There were minimal adjustments in LR on the original but the highlights were slightly blown so I did a second conversion at lower exposure and blended the two with "Blend if..." to limit it to only the lightest tones. Clicking that layer on and off, the mids and darks are virtually unaffected. I think it's just unusual lighting here, but I agree it does have an odd look. Haven't found a good fix, and I thought it would be simple.

Awesome

Excellent pose on this fine looking youngster Diane.

wow................

Diane I am late to the table. This is awesome!

Thanks, everyone! It was awesome to get to watch and photograph these youngsters learning to fly!

Thanks, everyone, and thanks to the "honchos" for the Editor's Choice -- I'm very honored! It was so awesome to watch these juveniles fledge, and I'm still out there a couple of days a week trying to capture a few more of the photo opportunities I've observed.