Cedar Waxwing

Welcome to NPN, Jeff! Certainly a good start; the bird is well positioned in the frame and the detail is good. You didn't say, but I assume from the crop this is from a vertical frame. This has caused a bit of cramping horizontally. It is usually good to have a bit more room in front of the bird and a little less behind. Ideally, there should be less of an angle, up or down, from lens to subject.

The light is pretty harsh , making for deep shadows and bright highlights. I don't know your processing program, but most photo editors are able to adjust highlights and shadows in many different ways. Finally, the deep blue sky could be toned down with some profit to the picture. As is, it serves to be a bit of a distraction.

Actually, this is a pretty good picture, and can be made better.

Pose is very nice with good catchlight in the eye. you've brought out the colors of the bird beautifully. But, I agree with Philip...the blue should be toned down.
Welcome to NPN.

Welcome, Jeff. I agree with Phil's comments. The image looks a bit oversaturated in general-easy enough to tone down.

Jeff,
You have received excellent comments from others, so I won't pile on. Welcome to the site. We look forward to future postings.

I'll add my welcome also Jeff. A wonderful capture of this waxwing using a lens that I know from experience isn't a particularly sharp piece of glass. You achieved pretty nice sharpness of the subject but looking at the large version I'll guess a significant amount of cropping went into it. Quite a bit of noise is evident there. I also might have left a tad more canvas for him to look into. Still an very nice image!

Jeff, I recently read an entry about the Cedar Waxwing in a bird book that said it was a rather drab-looking bird. The author had it wrong, and your picture proves that they are beautiful and colorful creatures. The colors of the bird in your picture are very nice. As the others say, it would be nice to have a little space to the left and right of the bird and a sky that wasn't quite such a deep blue.

Thanks for the comments. In my first attempt at editing, I tried toning down the blue using the HSL controls in LR4. Rather than reduce the vibrancy of the blue, this simply turned the blue to grey and I didn't like the effect. So, I reset the photo and instead tried turning down the highlights in the blue areas as best as I could. It turned the vibrant blue into a pale blue, yet the bird remained the same for the most part. While I agree the picture looks better, the picture lost some of its "punch". Any ideas on how to tone down the blues without losing the "punch" using LR4? - thanks.