This was taken in my back yard last march . I had planed on getting photos of a grey squirrel , but the jays found the peanuts first. After looking at the shots from that day , I probably should have been at f10 or maybe even f13 to get some detail on the tail. Hindsight is always 20/20
I used a second layer of just the stump with multiply as the blend mode to darken it and smart sharpen on just the bird.
1Ds mrkIII 400f5.6
1/2000 , f7.1
iso 500
Lovely image of a beautiful bird Stuart. Excellent background, great perch and nicely handled colours and tones. Feather detail and IQ looks excellent to me. I'm not bothered by the OOF tail. Thanks for sharing.
Good pose and perch. I love the foot gripping the wood. I disagree about stopping down more - the BG would have been more distracting as it is already showing signs of being too prominent with the streaking. Opening up the aperture, and/or placing the perch even further away from the BG tree line would be better IMO.