I'm not going to offer my thoughts other than I like the concept but I'm unsettled with this image...I will leave it up to you folks to straighten me out / confirm what I think my eyes see, etc.
This such a great capture, Jim, whatever the crop. My intial impression as far as the crop is that I would like to see it more of a pano (cropped just above the adult's wing) or, in the alternative, I would like to see more of the wing. Of course, this would give you 2 totally different images. Without seeing your original capture and what there is to work with, it's a bit difficult to speculate.
The chick is adorable ,with the classic loon foot raised, great catchlight, good head angle.
Slightly over sharpened to my eye, starting to look a bit crunchy , not quite as soft as natural.
The water behind the head is a bit distracting, both in texture , and the change of color, and it competes with the head for me.
I think the crop is effective. The adult is instantly recognizable because of the plumage, so you don't need to see more, and the chick has enough room.
You were really close in on this one based on your lens!
Well Randy, you picked up on a couple of the things that bothered me.
A) Chick lloks to sharp...almost crunchy as you say. I set the in camera sharpening to NONE and very lightly sharpened for output...I then masked the chicks body and ran a 0.1 Gaussian blur on it twice and still felt it looked overdone. Piping plover chicks and llon chicks feathers drive me nuts :)
B) Agree about the background. I may actually blur it out a bit. I needed to be at f10 to get some of the adults body sharp as these were probably 20' away from the edge of the kayak at most....they kept swimming right up to me.
C) The one thing that bugs me most which you didn't pick up on is the color of the chicks breast feathers. Somehow I see weird magenta or purple hue to the brown and no matter what I do, it doesn't go away.
I do see the magenta cast you pointed out.
At home I opened it in PS, did a selection on the breast, went to selective colors and pulled the magenta in the red channel way down, and that seemed to knock out he purple hue without changing the other colors, and it blended well with the rest of the body.
Perhaps you had already tried that, and weren't satisfied with the result, but it looked better to me.
Hitching a Ride ~ Loon Chick
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