Grebe + Repost

Steve, great capture. It's hard to know where they're going to surface. The fluffed feathers are really appealing, and great clarity on the head and eye.

Love those fluffed up feathers. Nice flying water droplets and green water too.

So glad you included the larger image, Steve. The water ripples, water droplets, and puffed feathers really make this image. Nice job.

Carol

The ruffled pose and flying water make this shot for me Steve. I wish for a little bit more light on the face here.

Nice fluffed look and water spray Steve. To me this needs some CCW rotation and as Nate stated more light on the face would have been nice. The large crop is evident in the loss of fine/crisp detail in the birds feathers and the need for NR.

Very nice action, nice light, on my monitor it looks a bit dark in places though.

Thank you everyone: very helpful, perceptive and thoughtful comments. There were three critical comments:
i. lightening the face/image: I found that just increasing exposure on the face did not look right. There is quite a complex range of light intensities across this image. So, in this repost I've brightened the whole image a little.
ii. ccw rotation: although there is not much to go on here, I do think a slight ccw rotation does improve the image. Please see the repost.
iii. cropping causing lack of fine/crisp detail in the feathers and causing the need for NR. As I've said previously, obtaining as many bird pixels in the image as possible maximizes detail. So, being close to the bird and/or large focal length lenses are certainly desirable for maximizing detail. However, once the image is obtained and the number of bird pixels fixed, then I've seen no evidence to indicate that, even quite severe cropping, causes further degradation of the posted image. The level of detail we see in the posted cropped image is the same as in the uncropped original. In this case, I would attribute any deficiencies not to cropping, or even to distance from the bird, but rather to lighting. However, I do feel happy with the detail for this image and, comparing with the original, see no reason to think that NR or cropping caused problems. To see even a higher level of detail in a larger crop, I'd encourage you to have a look at the image that I posted just previous to this one ("Brown Booby") at:
http://www.naturephotographers.net/imagecritique/ic.cgi?a=vp&pr=162996&CGISESSID=b4cc5e4de62924147d82d191af7f19aa&u=25589.

Thank you all again. I do much appreciate your comments, especially your critical comments. They help all of us learn more about this wonderful art.