I figure anyone who's been here awhile is likely to think this is vawendy's image, so I couldn't *not* mention that in my title ;-) Same state, but I'm a fair distance north and west of her.
And I have never seen a Bluebird in my yard before today!!! Mind you, I've lived in the same house for 20 years, but I don't live in a Bluebird-friendly bit of land, nor do I put anything in my feeders they'd be attracted to. They have no reason to want to visit here.
This one shows up while I am shooting birds (for about the 6th time this week) and just casually hangs out while I take his picture. I am stunned!!! I must have been really good this year to get a new camera and have a Bluebird show up in the same week as a Wild Bird challenge :-))) Just getting the shot made me happy! Framed by that curvy branch and looking straight at me, no less. Talk about luck of the Irish ;-)
PP - cropped, tonemapped in qtpfsgui (pregamma 0.697, mantiuk method, contrast mapping 0.1, saturation factor 1.49, detail factor 1), copied as layer onto original and merged at 50% transparency (just wanted a little more feather detail), white balance, increased contrast, cloned out a couple of small branches and shadows and cloned in some texture on the bird's chest in places, slight vignette, resized, sharpened, blurred background more, added border.
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haha!!! I just noticed this -- I was traveling home to Minnesota these past two weeks.
Quick!! put some suet out! The love the suet with blueberries in it. The like mealworms, too, but it takes a long time for them to find the mealworms, and everything else eats them instead. But they really like suet.
Nice DoF on this...blurred enough to set off the bird nicely but blurred so much as to not provide information about its environment. Nice color to this as well!
Very well done... DOF could have been just a wee bit better. Exposure is very well balanced, thanks for that, so many people have just absolutely blown out the highlights of their birds in this challenge.
Great shot, although i think that maybe you could improve it (just my opinion):
-The subject is too much off-centered
-The background is a little distracting, maybe another aperture or adding a TC could help to isolate the bird, but i understand that maybe it was not possible on the field.
-Rotate a little the image. The bird seems tilted.
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