For what it is worth, I rated this image as 6. Although the pose looks like the bird is gliding, the blurry tips of the wings indicate that it was actually flying. So for that it definitely meets the challenge. This image does have a few technical issues, some of which are mentioned in the comments from the voters. First, the image lacks any kind of detail to hold the viewers attention. Part of this is due to photographing a black subject against a gray sky. The gray sky has no details to highlight and being significantly lighter than the main subject makes it difficult to capture detail in the bird. What little detail is there is not very sharp (like the beak). You might want to wait to use USM until after you have resized your image, as some detail is lost during resizing. Another alternative is to use USM before and after resizing and if things start to look a little odd after the last USM operation, reduce the strength of USM to 50 to 70 instead of 100.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Too stark for my tastes. When I see something like this I think more of a glide than "action." I know the title says high speed, but this doesn't do it for me.
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