Downy+Repost

Neat bird in habitat shot. I like the texture in the dead limbs, the industry of the downy, and the fall colors (something we don't have much of in Florida).

cool behavioral/habitat shot, Steve. I might take a little bit more off the left.

I like the bird's activity and the fall colors in the bg here Steve. I'd crop a little from the left here and if you have more of the nice fall colors on the right include them. I can see a little noise in the bg, but not bad. I'm curious if you used any nr on this image? Not because I think it needs it but because I'm curious about the camera performance.

Steve

I love how the background on the right side of yout image reminds me of stained glass, very appealing imho.

I'd like to see a little less of the left side of the frame.

I like the pose of the downy, the textures of the wood and the light in the eye.

I think this image is unusual and quite appealing just as you've presented it Steve but I'm still struggling to figure out exactly why. It's a bit of a hodgepodge but I think that's what I like - the various and almost competing geometric shapes, colors and light with this woodpecker just doing it's thing amongst everything else. Typically I don't particularly like photos where the bird itself doesn't dominate the image but this just might be an exception. Made me think...

Thank you everyone. There is no more space on the right in the original image. However, I can make the fall colors a greater proportion of the image by further cropping. I went from an aspect ratio of 4 x 6 to one of 8x10 (=4x5) and also made it a bit smaller to move the bird more to the right. This resulted in an image of 3275x2620 pixels (=8.6 MP or 48% of full frame). Here it is. I agree: the look of the Fall colors sure trumps the dark tree!
Nate to answer your question regarding noise reduction: noise reduction and sharpening were applied. I'll now post the original and a pair of noise reduced version, one using Neat Image and the other using Dfine 2.0.

Here is a portion of the original raw image with no noise reduction or sharpening.

Here is the result of noise reduction using Neat Image.

Here is the result of Dfine 2.0 only.
Note: In the posted original and cropped whole images Neat Image was used. I'm still not sure which of these noise reduction programs is superior. In the fully automated mode it now looks to me that Dfine 2.0 retains detail better. So, I need to investigate that more. However, in a past image I found that the final sharpened image looked better when Neat Image was used. The difficulty in attempting comparisons is the number of ways of applying each of these programs. Currently my tentative conclusion is that many of these programs are capable of providing the same results if care is taken to tune the sharpening operation to the noise reduction while being very gentle about noise reduction. I'm striving to develop a workflow that requires minimal image-to-image tailoring. So far, I think that applying noise reduction to the whole image and sharpening only to sensitive parts of the image is the way to go. In other words, to date, I'm getting better results by not leaving noise in the bird. Hope this helps those of you who are interested in all this!

Thanks for the comparisons and info Steve, I do think the repost is a nice improvement, especially in terms of composition.