I would be grateful if you could tell me what was missing in the photos that did not pass the screening.

In the evening, when the light was coming from a low position, the background was dark, and the kingfisher stood out in impressive light. I was able to capture the moment when it spread its wings and thrust its head and legs forward to land on a branch. The title of the photo was "Pterosaur" because the kingfisher looked like a pterosaur. The photo was taken at 700mm using a Z9 with an AF-S NIKKOR 500mm f/4E FL ED VR and a TC14EⅢ. The settings were ISO1000, SS1/3200, F6.3. After using PureRaw4 for noise processing, the photos were developed in Lightroom Classic. The balance of highlights and shadows, as well as the saturation and contrast were adjusted so as not to destroy the impression of light. In both shooting and development, attention was paid to the impression of light, especially the dark background and the blue color of the kingfisher's back and the highlights of the left wing, the light reflected in the eyes, and the resolution of the feathers.

Hello Seiichi Tsuboya and welcome to the Critique Forum. 

Thank you for submitting this fine image to this forum. 

I am envious of the proximity to the bird that you achieved. It is a great photo.  We often don't know why our pictures are not selected. There are so many different people judging the photos and they don't all have experience and knowledge in all fields of photography.  But one thing that I noticed when I first saw your photo was that the crop was very tight. too tight in my opinion.  So what I did was to increase the canvas size and fill in the area added by using the Filled Selection / Content Aware. Then I cropped the image in a 5x7 format.

Another thing I would mention is that the black background gives an unnatural feel to the image. It would be better to have a background with foliage, or sky but not so dark and black. The only thing I did in that regards was to clone some of the lighter spots in the darker area to add definition to the background.

Then I imported your image in Nik Color Efex pro and I used the Enhance Details and the Tonal Contrast filters to add details and contrast.

Then I used Topaz Denoise although it was not really necessary since you had already denoised the image.

Another thing that might have bothered some curators is the blurry wing that is close to the face of the kingfisher. I know how hard it is to get a shot like this and I know that you cannot control the position of the wings. After all it is not like studio portrait setting when you tell your subject to move a little bit this way and that wayt !!! But if somehow that right wing could have been like the left wing i.e. open with feathers spread out, it would have made your image even better. But I still applaud you for this great shot. 

I hope these suggestions and comments are useful to you.

Best regards.

Lucie s.c. 

Thank you very much for your very clear and detailed explanation and advice. I will take it into consideration and continue to work hard.

Hi Seiichi-san,

I have been thinking about how to make your beautiful kingfisher a star. First I applied an HDR filter to get more dynamics (On1 Effects):

I could have just applied the filter to the bird, but I wanted to repaint the background anyway, which I did in PSE:

Then I went over the edges of the bird with a soft-focus brush (darken mode) - result:

Greetings

Udo

Thank you for your advice, it's very helpful. You might try removing the background.