r/photocritique

This was a very challenging photo to take.

Shot on Nikon D5100 with a 70-300mm non-VR lens I bought on resale (autofocus does not work). Sunbirds are comparable in size to Hummingbirds, only slightly larger. Getting the focus right was a moment of pure joy.

As for editing, very minimal editing was done in Darktable. Some local contrast on the bird and color boost on the iridescent feathers.

There were a couple of blurry branches in the foreground, removed them with GIMP.

All these were done on a laptop with a very bland and inaccurate LCD panel. The final tweaks were done using Adobe Lightroom Mobile. The amoled on my phone gives a much better idea of what to tweak. Added a slight vignette with heavy feathering to draw the eye on the bird.

Exif: 1/1250 | f/5/6 | 300mm (450mm equiv on APS-C) | ISO 400

Will add in camera JPEG for comparison in the comments.