Yellow-rumped warbler

[Christopher Miller]

I'd like your opinions on this photo of a yellow-rumped warbler I took.

Olympus SP-550 UZ
f4.7 @ 1/30, ISO 100, -0.3 EV
Spot metering
Auto white balance
Processed in Photoshop CS2; cropped, shadow/highlight, curves adjustment, saturation increase, some dodging on the eye, and sharpened

[Lance Peters]

Hi Chris - bird looks sharp and colours are good, nice catchlight in the eye.
Ha might be a little off, I find the dark branch that covers the tree trunk on the top RHS a little distracting - would probably QM it out. Also maybe some NR on the background.
Looking forward to seeing more :)

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Christopher,
I like the capture...you have good sharp details and good color rendition...the background is quite busy, you have a few branches intersecting the bird...I cloned out these and cleaned up the background by running noise reduction...see if this presents best to you...:cool:

[Jackie Schuknecht]

I knew Gus was going to go to work. Bird could just use a little more sharpening. Maybe high pass filter. Good HA and pose. Nice shot Christopher.

[Christopher Miller]

Thank you all for your suggestions. I ran some noise reduction on the background, cloned out the dark branch on the tree trunk, cloned out most of the background branches, and sharpened a little more. How does this look?

[Alfred Forns]

Agree the bg is cluttered and would like seeing it clean but would only remove a branch coming out of head or prominent part. I think starting to remove all the little twigs will be a mayor undertaking to have it look natural, more than I care to spend.

My focus on these images would improving at the time of capture. These little guys are difficult at best !!!