Definitely not winter

[Glenn Pure]

It's mid-summer here - no snow here! I captured this shot on New Year's Eve after having been to this location (Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra) a week earlier - but on a sunny day when photography was not going to give me the result I wanted. New Year's Eve was cloudy so I forgot about cleaning the kitchen that morning and headed out. This is an immature Eastern Spinebill - the closest thing Australia has to a hummingbird. They will hover at flowers but prefer the less energy-intensive approach of perching when feeding. Apologies for those who like their frames simple. This one clearly is not as is much about the flowering Kangaroo Paw as the bird. But I loved the setting and hope you do too. This is about half the frame area. No, I haven't boosted the saturation at all either! Happy New Year to all at BPN.

Thank you for looking and for any comments you are kind enough to share.

Technical: Canon 80D with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/640 sec, f7.1, ISO 1600. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 3, crop, lighting adjustments, NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Modest NR applied to bird and stronger to background. Bird only sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian Blur: 0.4 pixels at 50%) after final size reduction.

[Jay Ing]

Wow, what color and sharpness! Background overwhelms the poor birdie, but that's his/her playground so... very nice. As someone else recently said, you sure get your money's worth out of the 80D. Just great! Oh, learned something new... didn't know Neat Image worked with Photoshop Elements.

[Bill Dix]

Quite stunning. Happy New Year to you, Glenn. Thank you for all of your supportive comments this past year.

[Tim Foltz]

Glenn, nice colorful environment, sharp, HA is good. Not sure if I would have cropped it this way, maybe a vertical crop?
Very nice overall.

-Tim

[keith mitchell]

Glen it just shouts Australia,colours are beautiful,bird pin sharp,excellent.

Keith.

[Glenn Pure]

Thank you Jay, Bill, Tim and Keith.

... Not sure if I would have cropped it this way, maybe a vertical crop?
Very nice overall.

-Tim

Tim, I had a picture in my mind's eye of the bird in a sea of flower colour. I not sure I like the vertical crop but have presented one below out of interest. It does get rid of the dominant stem on the right of the OP, which is a 'plus'.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Wow, although the setting is indeed "in-your-face" I do think it works perfectly well here. It is highly appealing to me. I would actually add back some at right to prevent the large stem from skimming the top right edge. The subject pops nicely and is well focused among all those flowers. Very nice overall....Happy New Year as well!

[dankearl]

Whoa.. in your face color, i like it...

[Alex Becker]

Definitely in your face but its great. So much color and texture to take in in the BG and the bird is sharp with a great pose. In a perfect world I think the green stem wouldn't go through the bird but not a deal breaker by any means. TFS and I look forward to more.