My fish

Nice to get a full frame look. Head on pose is fine. Whites in the chest are blown. Maybe recoverable in raw. Clear halo around head and wings  from darkening the background. Processing is critical to quality images. 

A belated welcome to NPN Ry, great pose and great to get him with the fish.  The halo could be caused by sharpening the whole image, so try just selecting the bird and sharpening it.  The whites do look a bit hot on the throat so reducing the exposure may help there.  Looking forward to more of your posts and your comments on others images.

You have good focus and nice depth of field, Ry.  I like the framing and the fish is cool.  The breast looks overexposed in places.  What exposure mode are you using?  Particularly in bright light like this, you usually need to use some amount of negative compensation on your exposures when you have white on a bird.  You can also use manual exposure and just test your settings on something white in the sun occassionally to make sure you're not overexposing them.

Ry, the direct eye contact and the catch make this really nice, and the composition works well for the pose. You don't mention focal length, but I'm assuming 400 mm, and if so the detail looks pretty good, the f9 worked well to get enough detail. You also don't mention exposure compensation. It's best to bear in mind the overall light values of the raw image. With a bird that's mostly white like this I think your best exposure compensation is -1/3 to -2/3. The darks can be recovered in post-processing, and with under exposure the background would be darker, thereby minimizing the need to darken. I have found that darkening the BG too much can play tricks on you in terms of the halo effect as Keith mentioned, but sometimes you can achieve decent results as long as you're careful. Thanks for sharing.

Love the looking right at you and saying, "This is MY  FISH BUDDY!".   

Do you shoot in RAW?  After getting....way too many comments about blown highlights, I started shooting in RAW.  Blown highlights are pretty easy to get back in RAW, but impossible in jpeg.  BTW, I use the RAW + jpeg shooting mode.  Mainly because it took me a while to get used to the, faded, dull RAW photo.   It may look dull, but it has ALL the info you need to process it.    The addition of shooting with the + jpeg gives me a sense of what the photo really looks like.    

While a bit late, I’m guessing this is also a digital composite?