Male Downy Woodpecker

[Monte Brown]

Unfortunately the shot had to be cropped, the area under the bird was a tangle of branches.

Canon 50D
500 f/4 with 1.4 extender
300 @ f9
ISO 400 +1/3

Comments appreciated.

Monte Brown

[Juan Aragonés]

I like the Bg and eye contact but the composition is not the best. I think that you should keep some of the croped areas to avoid the sensation that the bird is cliped. Some room at the left and at the bottom of the frame should work better (of course, I didn´t see the original file so I really do not know how much distracting are the parts that you croped). The clean BG is nice but a round of selective noise reduction (only to the BG) would increase the quality of the BG. Try to to rework the dark areas in the head (eye and black under the red nape) to add more light and to get more details. Do not forget that the eye is a very important detail on an image and, if this image is not a big crop, I am sure that you have plenty of details in the eye area. :-)

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the head angle and BG and would go for a vertical portrait crop and sharpen the bird more.

[Randy Stout]

Monte:

I agree with the comments of Axel and Juan. Even if you could just show all of his feet, I think that would help the image. I would be tempted to clone out the small black spot on this head by the eye. The whites are very well handled. Sharpening the eye in particular would help a lot.

Cheers

Randy