Violet-crowned Hummingbird with flower added oil painting

[Gus Hallgren]

Hi Folks;

After 2 months of continuous 100+ heat, some days to 118F got a rainy day today and felt like playing.

Looking at the posts I must compliment the members of this forum for their fantastic improvement in OOTB. The quality has improved more than 10 fold 10+ I love it!

Violet-crowned Hummingbird was captured in Madera Canyon. I added flower with CS5 and created oil painting using free Foto Sketcher, and CS5 for finishing touches. This Hummer has a white breast and never showed up as hot in blinkies or LR3

Comments always welcome & appreciated.

Best regards

Gus

BTW; Must also compliment the technical staff for a much improved posting expeience. Well done!

[denise ippolito]

Gus, It's hot here in Jersey too. I like the pose and the composition. Love the background texture and color. I might tone down the reds and whites just a bit if it were mine. Nice work Gus!

[Paul Lagasi]

It reached 100 here today...and I am working in a boiler room....:eek:...its a balmy 105 outside my control room.

I like the image as posted, agree about reds and whites but lovely work Gus

[Bob Miller]

HI Gus.....100 here in Md as well
I like the bg but find the reds and whites too saturated. Also, the front wing has what looks like a brown splotch that blends into the bg too unevenly.

[Indranil Sircar]

Beautiful composition, Gus. Nice bg and I like hummer's pose. Agree with Denise on toning down the red. Nicely done.

So far it seems we are having cooler temps here in west coast

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Gus,
I hate hot weather....so spent all day in the AC. I hope we don;t have a power outage! I think if you give this one some more TLC and adress some of the issues mentioned.....this will shine!

[Brendan Dozier]

Great looking pose and comp, Gus. Good suggestions above, if it were mine, I would give it some more breathing room all around. Nice work!

[Andrew McLachlan]

Hi Gus, love the pose. Agree on toning down the reds and whites a bit. Very hot here also.

[Gus Hallgren]

Hi Folks;

Thank you very much for looking at my Hummer. Everyone of you is on the money with your gentle critiques, saturation and too much contrast a couple of my failings as over sharpening was before i got the message with Alley Oop's big club, As they say, "You can always tell a Swede, but you can't tell him much"

Warm hugs

Gus

[Hilary Hann]

Great suggestions, I really like this composition.

Freezing cold my end of the world … down to -2C last night.

[Gus Hallgren]

Great suggestions, I really like this composition.

Freezing cold my end of the world … down to -2C last night.

Hi Hilary;

Thanks for the reply & your kind words.

WOW! -2C, sounds like Alaska, though they don;t use Celsius. We live at 3000" and it was 80F at 5 AM this morning.

Best regards

Gus