"Trapped"

interesting little sail boat, nice find

Excellent image IMO Charlie. I really like the shadow of the pine needle. I find additional interest in the waterline where the edges of the feather are submerged. Thanks for sharing.

It's amazing sometimes what's right before our eyes when we make the effort to really look. You wonder what the story is with that feather. Did it come off the bird directly or did the wind deposit it there. So incredibly delicate. Nice composition
and excellent PP.

Beautiful picture! I like the gray and red colors together! Great sharpness, this is a really neat image!

I like this a lot Charlie. Great subject and your processing really helped the image. Great detail which leads to lot of questions about how it got there. Nice job.

Cool lines in this one, Charlie. I find the submerged twig on the left a bit distracting.

Thank you folks for responses. Hope you don't mind I'll comment and try to answer some of the inquiries togeather. The mallards are rather busy mating at this time and as happens there is a lot of fighting and feather pulling so there are numerous feather about the pond. Many of these get blown or washed among the rocks at the side. As to the pine needle they too are being blown around quite a bit at this time and along the fence are large collections of them that come down with needle on both side of a wire and so bunches can be seen clinging to the wires and I guess one blew across the edge of this feather.

Tim the way the appearance is different in the submerged and above surface of the feather was the main thing that attracted me to this at first. The light striking the feather and contrast was sweet IMO.

I'm not sure what you see as a "submerged twig on the left", Dennis.

Charlie: very cool image. Well seen, processed and presented IMO. I know you asked for suggestions for improvement but I'm quite taken with this exactly as presented. That's not to say it doesn't have room for improvement but without seeing the full frame it would be pure speculation in terms of comp. Perhaps a greater DOF that included the tip of the pine needles would take make this slightly or at least technically stronger, but at your close range you would have been pushing the limits of what can be accomplished, and likely begun struggling with defraction issues. I guess in a perfect world I might prefer this without the refection of the pine needles laying across the edge of the feather, but that's hardly within your control and also a very minor nit to a great image.

Whew! Or you can skip all that and just accept that you've created a great-looking image here!

... and just accept that you've created a great-looking image here!

And I do John.

Seeing the critiques here has given me much better awareness of the potential of my past photos and I'm positive it has made what i do now better than it might have been.Thank you for this critique. Some of what you said I felt too, when processing, but some will help in future.

Charlie