Eastern Bluebird

I was finally able to get close enough to this guy to get a decent photo. Taken this past Saturday in central NJ near Princeton. What could I have done to improve the photo? Thanks.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

WW... Excellent capture for sure... Bokeh is awesome as well... A tad close on the crop ... Nicely done... What lens were you using?? By the looks of it, that Sigma must have been it...

Thanks! I did crop it pretty tight to the bird. I guess I'm still more of a birder than a photographer. So I don't always focus on composition, etc. but more on the bird. Still learning since I've only had a DSLR for a few months now.

Yes, I was using the Bigma, at full zoom too.
500mm
1/100 sec
f/5.6
ISO 100

crop looks fine to me. I assume shot in RAW? USe vibrance slider to bring up some of that color data gathered by your sensor my friend. its a bluebird isnt it. make that boy blue! maybe a bit of contrast. if you want to be on the safe side go to curves nd to the preset box ontop, slect linear contrast. then maybe a tad of sharpening to help out the bigma (although thats very nice for full zoom =)

Very nice shot! I agree with what Walt has said in his post! I would clone out that small little branch in the bottom right.

Thanks for your positive comments. I appreciate your suggestions and will play around with the RAW file to make the colors more vibrant. Stay tuned...

yeah (BSB) youve got such a perfect BG for cloning get rid of that twig! hahah

PS were tuned post that baby!

Beautiful shot of this one!

Thanks everyone for you comments.
I played around with the RAW file a bit then did some additional tweaking, kind of along the lines of Wally's suggestions. Here's the result. Is it too much? Did I overdo the colors? Please provide you C&C. Thanks.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

Looking good...the re-worked image is especially nice!

Looks great, now get rid of that stick down in the corner...he..he....

Thanks. It was a steeper learning curve than I envisioned not having done a lot of post-processing of digital images in the past other than applying unsharp mask and tweaking the levels a bit. Plus I don't have Photoshop so I can't always directly apply suggested processing directions/procedures. I typically use RawTherapee and PaintShopPro in Windows but I only run WinXP on a older Toshiba laptop with a 15" screen. I processed this image on my Ubuntu Linux PC where I have a 20" LCD monitor. I used UFRAW (plugin) and The Gimp. I do think it came out looking spectacular but all C&C is welcome.

Steve, I'll have to give that a try just to see what I can do with it. PSP has a "clone brush" tool that I've used to mask out things like that stick. Not sure if PS or The Gimp has that tools as well. Thanks!

That re-worked image looks excellent to me. Beautiful pose and composition. I don't think the crop is too tight at all.

thx Sindri