Decades ago, I read about one of Playboy's most famous photographers favorite posing techniques during Playboys heyday, that often made his images far more popular with worldwide photographers, as opposed to the other photographers at Playboy. I was surprised to learn that he favored posing his models diagonally and keeping his images simple. Considering the attached image of a European Starling I recently took in my back yard, I would appreciate the excellent photographers on UHH sharing their thoughts on whether my choosing a diagonal positioning of my subject or the simplicity of the attached image are most important, or are there other elements of composition in this image that you would personally place ahead of diagonal composition and simplicity? Thank you in advance. Shooter41

Y'all might remember that I went through nearly a year of trying to get my 1 DX fixed. Never did. A few days ago Canon had a tent at the Phoenix Zoo and were showing off some new product. So I wondered by. I mentioned my difficulty with the 1Dx, which by chance I had been shooting that day. One of the fellows asked to look at it. He inquired if it had failed that day, and frankly I hadn't looked (as I've sort of learned to not bother). He looked back through my pictures and claimed they were all "perfect." Another fellow also looked and claimed them to all be "perfect."

These are two images they called "perfect." Notice they were both shot at exactly the same settings, but look at the difference. (These are undeveloped RAW converted to jpeg in LR.) I guess if that's what they call perfect, then my camera has no problems (which is what they claim!). There were about 6 more just like these that would have been some of the first they looked at.