Female Eastern Bluebird.

Certainly not as vibrant as her male counterpart, but she is darn right beautiful. Had this been the male's colours and the female all brown (à-la cardinal) then all lenses would be pointed at this instead:S3: Here's another perch I setup near a nestbox, and the female sure did like it a lot...stopping on it for a few moments almost every time she came back to the box.

Canon 7D + 500mm f/4 II + 1.4TC, manual exposure, evaluative metering, 1/400s., f/8, ISO 400, natural light, handheld (from the car, lens resting on window opening), full-frame, darkened pupil, cloned away a pale blue small gap at top-left corner, toned down the lower half of the perch.

Wow what a gorgeous image Dan! Love the IQ, colors, comp and HA.

Great comp - I like her pose on the perch very much. Excellent light and exposure, BG very nice. I think she has great color and is a wonderful specimen. Nothing to fix in my book, wish this one was mine! Congrats on a fine shot.

Barry

very nice capture,good pose,nice light and perch,stunner of a BG,bird sharp with good detail.well done.

Daniel Sir,
Absolutely superb image of beautiful lady.
Love the pose,colors,nice details,lights,perch,superb BG and composition.

Regards,
Satish.

I like the females a lot, as with most birds, i usually prefer them for some reason.
Excellent perch and a creative way you captured these.

Very nice colorful and light image with great detail. Nice to hear how you photographed this bird.

Laurent

Hi Dan, maybe not as striking as the male, but certainly enough colour to stand out. Sharp, soft light, and love the high placement on the perch, and against a smooth BG.

Superb, as always. I love the color gradient in the BG, but wondering if the yellow-green, beautiful as it is, is competing with the bird just a little too much in the top half or so?

Super pose and comp, Sharp and lovely soft colours Great looking bird.

I took the liberty of doing a little adjusting -- brought the BG color a little closer to the lovely palette of the bird, using Hue-Sat on greens and yellows, masked to the BG, and added just a touch of contrast to the bird. All a matter of taste, of course.

This is a beautiful image, I like the vertical comp. I prefer Diane repost, very little in it though, nice work.

Were it mine, I would probably explore more contrast on the bird, but didn't want to mess with Daniel's art. Mostly just wanted to show how a subtle tweak to the BG color brought it a little more in harmony with the bird's color palette.

I think Dianne has improved a little on what was already a great image....I can see some jpeg artifacts { wavy areas } in the backdrop on both images though, but only really noticeable if I scroll image up and down a little and look closely

Sweet photo from top to bottom Daniel. A real beauty! (I see the artifacts more in Diane's than Daniel's, but I get that too from downsizing and posting for web on that kind of background).

That's what working in 8 bits gets you with lovely subtle tonal gradients. The many thousands of tonal levels in each channel in a 16 bit image (really how many depends on what the camera captured) gives you a lot more overhead for adjustments, and subtle cloning, than the 256 levels in an 8 bit image. With fewer levels you get posterization a lot sooner.

Thanks for the comments all! Diane, I like your repost...thanks for taking the time to do it:S3:

You're welcome! Glad you like it!

Daniel:

Very well constructed image, pose, sharpness, interesting perch without being overpowering.

Good tweaks by Diane.

Cheers

Randy

I like the simplicity of the frame and the technical excellence. Great perch too.

Excellent pose, perch & BG. Lovely colors & IQ.

Wow you have captured this female with perfect settings
i love the BG and the details on the bird, sweet and simple and yet very very classy

Wow,Excellent BG,pose, perch .very nice colors & IQ.

Lovely image Dan, I was about to comments on the contrast and background but I see Diane has probably done a better job than I!! Similarly with my 7D the greens frequently give me problems, often being a little heavy handed with the yellows