Least Bittern/redo

The pose is priceless, and oh so typical for these birds. The whole image has some artistic feel to it, which I like ! Nice work . Cheers, Hans

Very cool, Barbara. I'm still hoping to get one of these down here in Texas.  Just missed one last week that other people were watching while I was shooting a pair of ducks 30 feet away.  I'd be tempted to bring the brightness of the whole image up a bit to get the water to show a bit better.

Nice pose - the eyes of this species always pull me in.

There's a bit of strangeness in the appearance of the reeds behind the bittern, and of the edge of the bittern's back that might be form either the selection you made or the noise reduction you applied.

The detail comes through much better in the larger image but I do agree that lightning it up would be beneficial.  I've never seen one of these.  I like the pose and the head turn.

Richard, I was horrified when I looked at this again in actual pixels.  And, Dennis and David, that's related to the fact that I darkened the water instead of brightening it.  The water is really messy.  I removed white spots, and I also tried to make some other clean-up type changes.  How I missed the end effect of those changes I don't know. 

So now I've had to clean up the clean-up, thus making this image have way too much "hand work" in it, and I'm going to post a redo here, but what I really need to do and will do is start over from the beginning and do a repost at some point.  So I did lighten the bird and reeds again, but the water lightening will have to wait until then.

My apologies to everyone.

Very cool pose.  I like that very much.  The processing is off.  Your repost is an improvement but you still have a color cast.  I applied a curves adjustment layer after finding the white and black points in the image.  Here's the result.

Keith, that is SO MUCH better.  Thank you.

I'd love to have an image of this species so out in the open as this Barbara- a very difficult bird to find.