Taken at The Pinery Provincial Park (Ontario) this morning in subdued overcast lighting. Somewhat backlit required some exposure and lighting adjustment in PP, but there was enough dynamic range to nicely recover the details.
I cloned out a twig and a leaf or two, but purposely left the twig and spider web in the upper-left in for framing.
D3 & 500VR hand held
1/320s f/4.0 at 500.0mm iso400 no flash
Nicely done under somewhat challenging lighting conditions. Good exposure.
I would prefer not to have so much of the body blocked by the perch, but it is the right color!
The flower is great. I appreciate your reasons for leaving in the twig in LUC, but I think the image would work well with out it also. If you really want to clean up the image, you could remove the dark twig behind the flower. Personal taste really, but is an option.
Randy, thanks very much for the thoughtful comments. I agree with all of your points but want to think about removing the twig in the LUC -- I don't really care for super-clean "antiseptic" images. That said, I thought about removing the dark twig behind the flower but it's a bit of work and I decided to wait for comments before doing the edit.