Superb Fairy-wren (female)

[Glenn Pure]

Another shot from a few years ago with my old 100-400 lens, showing it can do well in the right circumstances. Also with my old 700D Canon body. The twig in front of the lower legs isn't ideal but I liked the pose, overall look of this and the grass head in the bird's bill probably being used for nesting material. This is a fairly hard crop of about a third of the frame area.

As always, thank you for looking and for any comments you are kind enough to share.

Technical: Canon 700D with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM (original version) at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/640 sec, f8, ISO 400. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 2.5, crop, lighting adjustments, reduced luminance NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Modest NR to bird and stronger NR to background. Bird only sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian Blur, 0.2 pixels at 50%) after final size reduction.

[arash_hazeghi]

looks good Glenn, I like how is hanging on to the twig (nesting material?) adds a touch of behavior. I'd clone out the lower OOF twig and the dead on up on top

TFS

[Paul Burdett]

Hi Glenn. Very nice...I agree with Arash regarding the oof twig. For some reason I can't scroll...so the bird is cut off on the right side.

[Joseph Przybyla]

Sweet little bird, very fitting name. Nice feather detail, exposure and color look good. I guess I would, as others have suggested, clone out the out of focus twig at the bottom. Thank you for sharing.

[Bill Dix]

Great pose, and the nesting material is a big bonus. BG is nice but I agree about the oof twig. The sharpness seems to fall off at the top of the head, which surprises me at f/8 and a largish crop where I would have expected more DOF. But otherwise it's a very pleasing image.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Glenn, love how the little guy is holding onto the perch with his left leg/foot. The diagonal perch works well, and pulling on the piece of grass in his beak, takes this up a few notches.

[Glenn Pure]

Many thanks Arash, Paul, Joe, Bill and Stu. Agree that oof grass stem is distracting. I'm torn ethically these days with cloning stuff out. I still do it but not entirely comfortable about it. As for the top of the head looking less sharp, the RAW is OK but the whole thing isn't as crisp as I'd get with the Mark II lens I now have. I think it is just that the slight softness is showing up more there due to the lower contrast of the plumage on that part.

[annmpacheco]

Very nice Glenn, sweet, and i echo the above suggestions.