Canon 50D, 300mm 2.8 lens w/2X TC, 1/400 sec, f5.6, ISO 400.
Fairly heavy crop, for me. Cloned out distracting branches, reduced the saturation to bring out some feather detail.
Nice head angle and good placement of the bird in the frame. I would prefer if the central stem did not touch the breast. I think image quality suffers a little from the crop, as you point out yourself. I also see some artifacts around the edges of the bird, especially above and below the beak.
Hi John- I think you could loosen up the crop some and still have a beautiful image. The pose and head angle are great and really show off the bird. I would crop some off the bottom (to lose the dark stick LL), and add some room to the top. Generally you want more room at the top than the bottom in an image like this. The main thing you need to so is play with the saturation of the red channel which is clipped in many parts of this image. Here are a couple of BPN links on the subject:
Male Cardinal
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