No every bird is best displayed in portrait form. Portraits don't show a long tail or the habitat. Portraits don't always tell the story. Don't get me wrong, there is a place for a good portrait. Things just get boring if every image is a portrait though. Take the Magpie Shrike, for example. They like to perch and then to look down as they look for food. They catch most of their food on or close to the ground. They are often found on thorn bushes. Shrikes sometimes use those thorns to impale their meals with. So why not take the image to tell the whole story?

It is so tempting to zoom in closer, to fill that frame with the bird. And yes, I do recommend filling the frame. But in this case the frame is filled. Perhaps not by the bird but by the whole story. This image tells the story of this bird and how it hunts, where it lives, and the weapons it uses. Not every image needs to be of just the bird. I love that the twigs with their thorns make part of this image's story. Good composition is in place. The bird is strategically placed in the frame. The zoom is set so that the twigs fill the rest of the frame. The bird has space to look into. Its eye is clearly visible. The longer tail plays its part in balancing the composition.

          Overall, I like that this image tells the story. Perhaps some images are just better suited to story telling than others. For the photographer the skill is to know when to zoom in to capture the bird or the action and when to zoom out to tell the story.