First Summer male Summer Tanager

[Wheeler McDougal Jr.]

I took this bird about four years ago in a park west of Peoria, Illinois. I had never seen a first summer Summer Tanager and have not seen one again. I removed some offensive sticks and added a wash to the sky. Opinions sought.
Nikon D2H
2005:06:07 06:32:47
700mm
1050mm (in 35mm film)
1/125 sec, f/5.6
Mode: Manual
Metering: Spot
ISO: 100
White balance: Auto
Flash: Off
File size: 28.2MB
Image size: 1639 x 1208
Color space: AdobeRGB
Saturation: Normal
Sharpness: Normal
Contrast: Normal
Color profile: Adobe RGB (1998)

[Randy Stout]

Wheeler:

The sky is nice, colors look good.

The major issue for me is sharpness. The entire frame looks soft to me. Possibly the slow shutter speed with that long EFL. I think you could have pushed up your ISO a bit to give you some more shutter speed flexibility.
There are lots of cloning marks in the sky, both above to the right and below the bird. Perhaps you used the patch tool or healing brush with too hard of an edge?

Randy

[Juan Aragonés]

I echoe what Randy said. You can fix some things in this image but unfortunately, the most important one, lack of sharpness, can not be fixed :-(

[Daniel Cadieux]

Although this is a nice species in nice transitional plumage, the image is suffers badly from camera motion blur. If this was handheld at that focal lenght then you never gave yourself a chance with that ISO/shutter speed...and even with a tripod trying to track a moving subject.