Northern cardinal (female) from woods in back

[Dennis Zaebst]

From February 2012 in my back yard woods. Taken at 5:00 pm when the sun was low over my shoulder. Got lucky on this one as there aren't many spots with a more or less clean BG. I cleaned up a stray branch in the LRC. Selective sharpening and BG NR.

Canon 7D, ISO 400
500 mm f/4L IS + 1.4x TC II
1/125 sec. @ f/5.6
AV mode, Pattern metering @ +2/3 EV

C/C always welcome and learned from. (Preposition at the end of the sentence, but it sounds less stuffy than "... and from which I learn".

[wendell westfall]

Dennis, I like everything about the bird . . . in fact, about the entire image . . . by the way, i'm not sure if it is looking at me or at the vertical branch it seems to be shying away from (better than at the branch from which it is shying) (?).

[arash_hazeghi]

I like the idea of a vertical branch to anchor the composition but I think it would work better if there was more separation between the cardinal and the branch and if the branch was a bit thinner

techs: The critical focus appears to be on the wing area leaving the head a bit soft. BG and colors are good

TFS

[Marina Scarr]

Exposure, colors and BG look good. Agree the perch would work if it were farther away from the bird. Focus is off as noted. Your best bet is to focus on a bird/subject's eye, and then recompose. That way you know your eye is always going to be sharp.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Arash and Marina echo my thoughts. Great looking female cardinal though, nice BG, and the perch has nice weathering to it. For web presentation some more sharpening to the face would likely work.

[Satish Ranadive]

Dennis:
I have taken the privilege to modified the image and hope you don't mind.Here is the image,where I have removed the vertical branch which is competing with cardinal and sharpened slightly.



Regards,
Satish.

[Dennis Zaebst]

Thanks everyone for the helpful comments. Satish, I like your rendition, but you gave me an idea. I remembered the content-aware move tool in CS6. I also sharpened a bit more. I hope this is an improvement. Thanks again, and of course I would appreciate your further thoughts.