Yep, 2 days before rollover, and it was time for a trip to the local wildlife park. My wife bought a family season pass recently, so you might see more wildlife photos from me. :)
Of 226 photos, this was the final shot of the day.
Hopefully it is not too over-edited for people's taste. After several hours work, it looks surprisingly close to the original. :( Lots of D&B, and lots of sharpening, masked off to certain areas. After my usual sharpening, I added an extra layer of insanely strong sharpening (as far as the slider would go) around the eyes and beak. I'm surprised that it still didn't create any really noticeable sharpening artifacts.
I'm sure some people will comment about the sharpening artifacts on the head feathers, but this is actually the small side-branches of the feathers, which you can see if you look closely.
I hope the vignette is not too strong. Some of it was a natural light patch in the background, but I did enhance it a little.
Statistics
Place: 136 out of 394 Avg (all users): 5.8702 Avg (commenters): 6.5714 Avg (participants): 5.7609 Avg (non-participants): 6.1282 Views since voting: 1106 Views during voting: 247 Votes: 131 Comments: 7 Favorites: 0
Composition is lovely; color and detail are superb. The light reflection in the eye is really bothering me, though. It looks really odd. Personally, I would burn the cloudy area so it looked like a normal dark eye with a normal catchlight.
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
