Great Blue Heron display

[Raul Quinones]

Image made at Wakodahatchee /w afternoon light.
Almost full frame, small crop to the left side to move subject from center.

Canon 40D, 500mm, 1.4TC
1/1250 7.1 ISO320 700mm

As always comments and recommendations welcome.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great pose, light and details. It's a bit tight in the frame for my taste, particularly at the bottom.

[Gus Cobos]

Very nice composition Raul, but that faded branch in the background to the right of the frame catches my eye and will not let me pay attention to the bird...:confused: clone it out my friend...:D Everything else is fine...

[Raul Quinones]

Thanks for comments.
Gus,
I tough about cloning then out, but I was not able to make a "clean clone".
I think that sometimes, when you get an image burn in your brain is hard to modify it and "see" a "believable" image.
Not sure if I am a describing it correctly (mainly because English is my second language... I think I will having problems explain it in Spanish also)

Saludos, Raul

[Fabs Forns]

hi Raul familiar scene!
Rather than cloning, I would blur it a little bit.
Create a duplicate layer, using the Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur to get a softer look on the tree. Go to the tihrd box from left in the layers palette and click it to create a layer mask. Select your Brush and making sure black is the foreground color in your Tools palette, brush away the effect (blur) from the rest of the picture to keep the blur only in the tree. White as foreground will have the opposite effect.
PS: Do not blur too much and reduce the opacity of the brush when you are close to the feathers!

[Raul Quinones]

Thanks Fabiola, I reworked the image as per your recommendation, and a subtle difference improved the image, and still it resembles the mental picture I have when made the image. I try to blur the tree before, without acceptables results, but the trick of reducing the opacity when close to the feathers made the differerence.

Raul