Assignment: different perspective on a peacock

[Jerry van Dijk]

Texture and color image I had lying around for a while. Actually, I wanted a peacock portrait, but this particular bird refused to stand still in front of a nice even background. I was struck by the awesome combination of colors and textures on the side of the bird and took a picture of that instead.
Panasonic DMC-FZ18, handheld, 83 mm (500mm eq.), ISO-100, F/4.2, 1/125 sec, RAW. PP in Silkypix and Corel Photopaint. Pano crop.
Cheers,

Jerry

http://i33.tinypic.com/4qsvna.jpg

[Bill Dix]

Lovely color and texture shot. Great color; sharp and well composed. My eye jumps back and forth between the black and white on the left and the beautiful peacock's "eye" on the right, so I wonder if toning down the whites on the left just a bit might help. I don't know the camera, but you might have considered a higher ISO allowing a smaller aperture at that SS, to get even sharper, IMHO. Great shot in any event.

Bill

[Gail Spitler]

Love the crop. I agree with Bill that the whites may be a bit hot.
Cheers
Gail

[Christopher Miller]

Beautiful colors and textures, Jerry. Great composition too. I agree with Bill's suggestions.

[Gus Cobos]

I like the composition, image and capture Jerry. The combination of colors and textures are superb...well done...:cool:

[Jerry van Dijk]

Thanks for all your comments. I thought the B/W area added to the dynamics of the composition, but I also experienced the same as Bill. I couldn't figure out what to do about it though. Thanks for pointing out that toning down the whites might help in this case.
Regarding the ISO/DOF issue: it was quite an overcast day, but my camera (which uses a small CCD sensor) produces horrible amounts of noise when photographing above ISO-100, especially under difficult light conditions. More DOF would have been better though.
Kind regards,

Jerry.