What’s wrong with this picture?

This is a superb starling I captured in Kenya. It’s a beautiful bird, and I was lucky to be able to take this frame-filling shot with a 500mm f/4 Canon telephoto and a 2x teleconverter giving me 1000mm of focal length. I like this image a lot except for one thing. In the lower right corner, the out of focus branch is, once you notice it, quite distracting. I find that my eye tends to wander down to that corner too often, and that’s not how a successful image is supposed to work. The branch in the lower left corner isn’t ideal also, but it’s not terribly distracting at least to my eye. Ideally, though, it should be removed.

In this version, I replaced the out of focus right corner with a piece of a branch from another tree. This was simply a copy and paste move. For the lower left issue, I used the clone tool and a large brush to blend the sky over the offending branch. Now the portrait of the starling has no distracting elements and nothing to divert our attention from where it should be -- on the bird.

When photographing birds with very dark or black feathers, it’s best to have low angled front lighting if possible because the illumination fills in the dark details of the bird and allows us to appreciate all that detail. Alternatively, overcast lighting works, too, as long as the background isn’t too bright. The last thing you want to do is photograph a dark bird in front of a sunny background. §