California's Towhee with a catch

[Sridatta Chegu]

Got lucky with a close-up shot of this guy. Still 25% crop.
Canon 1D-X + 400mm f/5.6L + 1.4x III
560mm, f/8, 1/800, ISO 800, +0eV

[arash_hazeghi]

great light and I like the food item. BG was nice too, sharp. You can post 1200 pixels wide for better viewing. A vertical also works here

[Petros Petrou]

Great image although I think that that insect would disagree I like the light, detail and BG. You could go with a bit less sharpening.

[Daniel Cadieux]

I like the light and very neat food item. Sweet BG. The image is oversharpened as posted though.

[Lorant Voros]

Very nice super close up with sweet BG and good details everywhere. Food is a bonus. Agree that it needs a lot less sharpening thought. Well done.

[Sridatta Chegu]

Thanks everyone for the comments. I always have hard time perceiving sharpness on my retinal macbook pro. Here is the image without applying output sharpening. Pls let me know if is good enough.

[Richard Flack]

Amazing detail on this Sridatta! Awesome light and killer prey item. TFS

[Shawn Zierman]

The light quality is killer. The head angle is awesome, and the prey item is really sweet. The sharpening looks better on the repost, but still leaves a little too be desired in the image quality department. With a 1D-x, at 75% of the image at this low of an ISO, I would expect more in the image quality department...Can you post a screen capture of the RAW file uncropped, just to compare....?

[Sridatta Chegu]

Thanks Richard and Shawn.

@Shawn - here is the uncropped image.

[Marina Scarr]

Super portrait with amazing light and background. The prey tells a great story here. Repost works better in terms of sharpening.

[Shawn Zierman]

Thanks for the full frame...it clarifies what I was not getting in terms of image quality with that gear. I guess I misunderstood when you said that you photographed a "close up" of this bird and "still 25% crop"....I guess that meant you cropped off about 75% of the actual image, and the large crop explains the image quality deficit...