On the point

[Mark Fuge]

Shot early morning at Merritt Island NWR. Like the reflection and the setting of the point.

Canon EOS 5D
Shutter Speed - 1/2000Sec.
Aperture - f/6.3
Metering Modes - Spot
Exposure Compensation - 0
ISO - 200
Lens – 300 f/2.8L
Focal Length - 300 mm

[Chris Hansen]

Mark,
I love the moodiness of the image and the composition. You might think about removing the one stick behind the bird. On my monitor I'm picking up some sort of blockiness or artifacts throughout most of the top of the image. Also the image seems to have a bluish cast to it. Keep them coming. It's nice to see a well composed habitat shot once in awhile

[David Thomasson]

Appears to be a beautiful image, but it evidently was saved as a jpeg as a very low quality level. These are jpeg compressions artifacts. If you save the original at level 10 (in Photoshop), you probably won't see any of these artifacts.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Yes, something went wrong when saving the image, it's only 23kB and David pointed out the artifacts. You can reply to your own thread with a different version of this image.

[Brian Wong]

... or perhaps a large crop compounded with the JPEG compression?

[Mark Fuge]

Thanks for the comments. I didn't see the artifacts in my image, but went back and redid it. I was working from the original RAW image in Canon's RAW program and then finalizing it in Photo Elements 2 & 4. I am having a problem with Elements 4 as I can not make the border come out, so this time I stuck with my old faithful Ver 2.

I changed the settings somewhat as well and eliminated the branch behind the bird.

Give it another shot! ; > ) Just don't kill the bird....

[Fabs Forns]

Much better rendition, very clean this time. It must have been the compression on the earlier version. The whites on the bird are borderline in this version, although maybe not blown.