Frosted Apples : Varied Thrush

EOS 1D MARK III
Canon 600 F4 IS + 1.4X
F5.6 at 1/125
expo.comp. +0.33
ISO 1000
weather overcast
25/12/2009 10:15am
Gabriola Island B.C.
I made this image on Christmas day morning. A wonderful Christmas present, don't you think? I removed some distracting branches from the left side and bottom right of the image. I did a one pass ps nr on the bg. I cropped the image from all 4 sides, approx. 20%. I have been away from BPN for quite sometime now, so I would like to take this opportunity to welcome myself back [smile].

Welcome back Ted! A beautiful specimen. I like the natural setting and the frost, really adds to the image. Good colors, nice pose. Great BG. Seems to be a bit of noise in the black feathers on the back, but not surprising at 1000 ISO. Overall great shot!

Hi Ted, I like the pose of the bird. Your exposure looks good as I see details in the darks. I find the background pleasing. I love the frost and fruit. If it were mine I would be clone out the out of focus branch at the bottom that runs out of the frame. For my taste the it seems a little tight at the top. On my monitor the colors seemed a bit over saturated. I took a look at the image in photoshop and the the red and blue channels were showing a bit of clipping. I adjusted the colors using an inverse average blur layer with its blending set to color and adjusted the opacity till the histograms showed no clipping.

Thanks for the comments Jim and Phil. they are very much appreciated. Thanks Phil for the extra effort you put in redoing my image and displaying the histograms. I see I have to take more care when optimizing my images. Thanks for the heads up!
Ted

Beautiful bird and spectacular perch .. lovely image.

Thanks Malcolm. Nature has beautiful subjects. What we have to do as photographers and lovers of nature is try to capture that special moment. Can you think of any thing better to be doing?
Ted

A beautiful bird and image. Good advise about cloning the OOF branch. Yes, nature is amazing.