Blue bird......

[just me]

Taken with Olympus E-M5, and 100-300mm Panasonic lens....

Griddi.....

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Griddi,

Nice bokeh.

For me there's a bit too much deadspace behind the bird's back, I think I'd crop to something like 4:5 landscape format.

Hope that helps,

[JPS]

Hi Griddi,
Nice picture.
In addition to Dave's advice about a slight crop; which I agree with, I would suggest sharpening the picture a bit.
I tried and IMO it made a very nice picture, just that little bit better.
I used the unsharp mask tool in PSE9 @ Amount 130% / radius 0.7 / Threshold 0
Thanks for sharing.

[just me]

Hi Griddi,
Nice picture.
In addition to Dave's advice about a slight crop; which I agree with, I would suggest sharpening the picture a bit.
I tried and IMO it made a very nice picture, just that little bit better.
I used the unsharp mask tool in PSE9 @ Amount 130% / radius 0.7 / Threshold 0
Thanks for sharing.

Thank you Dave and John,

I cropped the photo a bit, and also did some sharpening, so is the photo now better ?

Griddi....

[NorthernFocus]

Cool looking bird. The second version is better IMO.

[just me]

Hi Dan,

Thank you, I like the new version better too.......

Always helpful if other members give advise etc.

Griddi.....

[Loose Canon]

Hi Griddi!

Very nice shot of this guy(gal?). The lighting is really nice.

I like the newer crop. Without knowing what you did as far as sharpening, for this shot I would have suggested some local sharpening. In the second crop some noise is starting to appear in the background. Not enough to make any huge difference and certainly not a deal-breaker by any stretch, but global sharpening would not help that situation. Plus that way one could control what sharpening the stick received. I'm not sure it necessarily needed any sharpening, but if you went local this could control it.

I tried some noise reduction on it and it helped the background. I have some software for this, but if I didn’t, I might give the background a little blur to see if that would help mitigate the noise.

To me, in this nice lighting, this shot screams for some vignetting. But that's just me. This technique doesn't seem to be used much around here!