What To Do?

[jcuknz]

When you get past the first steps with the editor you can add catch lights to the eye[s] of your subjects with the sun behind them. Remember hearing about a photographer who in the days of slides would use a fine needle to put a hole in the slide so the projector light shone through and gave an approximation of a catch light .... sorry I forgot to do this for Madam

It is worth experimenting with using your flash on closer objects than Madam was ... setting the flash as minus one stop or perhaps minus 1.5 stops which lightens shadows to what the camera can handle, which you didn't need in this nice soft NJ sunlight , quite lovely light as I experienced in a NY visit some years back, and gives you catchlights as a bonus ... snag being if the subject is looking at the camera you could get 'red-eye' ... my late departed cat looked most peculiar ... she had different coloured eyes anyway.

Light from a source diminishes at the inverse square of the distance so the practical effect is that at normal ISO the on-board is a little weak as a source light at night but usually makes an excellent syncro-sunlight fill when adjusted as suggested above for closer subjects where you do not want harsh dark shadows.

Contra Jour is a very effective lighting set-up so long as you know how to handle it and I liked the contrast of the rim of light on the breast and beak against the dark post which would have probably been lost with just the water as a background. I was going to suggest you should have stepped to the right a step or two until I appreciated how nicely the backlight separated Madam from the post. The post being dark also gives a vignetting effect of framing Madam. Some people would vignette the water around her but I think that rather old fashioned Pity there were not two posts to frame her ... Different people different approaches Hard to find nice backgrounds for the composition one would like ... though one could perhaps duplicate the post to achieve the effect .... this is ART rather than documentary shooting I think and we are after a pleasing image rather than a record shot which has been done a thousand times before.
My editing is a bit rough and imprecise as it is not my shot and I am trying to give you the idea of what I think it should be. Particularly with the headshot which if using the full or near full frame of even a small sensor would look great, particularly from a Nikon such as you have

PS. None of us are second rate amateur photographers but just the best, only trouble is the world doesn't appreciate us

[Dave Humphries]

I tried using fill flash on a bird once, result: disastrous 'pet eye' and that was just the puny on-camera flash too - mind you, the subject, a heron, does have quite large pupils

[Blackspeare]

Thank you for the critique, advice and a few laughs.

[Blackspeare]

Thank you for the critique, advice, and a few laughs.