Bolsa Chica Kestrels

Could be a little clearer and less background noise. Great action photo though.

I agree it is a great behavioral/action shot. Personally I would crop a little off the right side. I also think it looks very soft and the BG is noisy. Is this a large crop?

great action, Patrick, love the look the female's giving you. How much did you crop this? The noise and lack of detail suggest a large crop.

Patrick,
I'm glad you were able to capture a series of matings. You have a good pose, particularly the female with some catch light in the eye and the male with wings up. You also cleaned up the branch nicely leaving a pleasing perch. I have a couple of suggestions. You might want to mask the birds and run some background noise reduction leaving the birds untouched. I believe you shot them in the late afternoon and the birds should appear pretty saturated and they are not. I'm wondering if that was auto ISO at work. As you know the males chest is a very bright orange along with his talons, beak, and eye sockets. I notice you shot these birds at F/16. I think you might be giving up too much shutter speed and I really don't think you need to go more than F/8 or so to get both birds sharp.
I would also consider cropping more from the right side and the top, and add some canvas to the left side. Just a thought. I will be at BC tomorrow afternoon at about 2:00 for the good light in the afternoon. Hope to see you, Eric, Harry and others there as well. It should not last much longer. This has been going on now for almost 3 weeks now. Keep your fingers crossed.

This photo was significantly cropped. I have photographed there the last three days and all of the photos of these birds at these trees have significant noise and are a little soft when cropped. David gave me so advice about how to process these, which I will follow and see what happens.

With changes David suggested

Great action, Patrick. The composition is excellent. It looks rather noisy for iso 500, is it a large crop?

I like the possibilities for this image. Others noted some of the issues. I don't know what happened in the repost, but it looks way over saturated and the shadow areas got blocked up. Did you embed a color profile with the repost? Something seems off.