Happy Easter Bluebird (Extreme Close-up Theme)

[Steve Large]

Happy Easter Everyone,
Here is my installment for this month's theme "Extreme Close-ups".

Stats: Canon 50D, 500mm + 1.4X, ISO 800, F/7.1, 1/3200sec.

Have a great weekend,

Steve

[Stu Bowie]

Steve, good sharp detail around the beak, head and eye, and I really the blues on these guys.

[Craig Brelsford]

Common yet stunning bird. I'm not sure why you needed to shoot the bluebird at 1/3200. Why not reduce your speed, stop down, and maybe get more of that area beneath the head in focus? Don't know about your system, but in brilliant light such as that recorded here, it also may have been possible to up the ISO, allowing you to conserve some of your shutter speed (assuming a high speed was necessary) and still stop down. The foregoing is all water under the bridge as regards this image. Let me therefore throw out something else for you. That streak of harsh light across the beak looks as if it could bleed. You could blacken it up a bit without much trouble.

[Arthur Morris]

Hey Steve, Something about this one is unsettling for me.... Not sure if it is the rather harsh light, the brightness, the saturation, or the narrow range of sharp feathers... I might try a bit of de-sat and reducing the contrast a bit with a reverse S-curve.