Mountain Bluebird

Hi and welcome! Looking forward to your images, as well as your comments and critiques of other's work.
You weren't given much light here, but you made the best of it. You have a fairly good pose, and a complimentary BG.
Try lightening the whole thing up, cloning out some/many of the surrounding and "messy" branches (some who are "purists" here won't like that suggestion ), and adding some blue saturation to make this look like a BB! Can hardly tell, as is.
You can also post a second, larger image of 1200 pixels on the longer side - see the posting guidelines. A large image allows us to see the detail and offer better suggestions.

Glad you're with us!

Sandy

Welcome to NPN!

You certainly found a nice subject and did a good job finding a situation which would yield a nice BG.
There are a few things that I think would have improved the result. The first is based on the fact that, generally speaking, bird photos work better when the subject is mostly frontlit. This bird was lit from the side, almost approaching a backlighting situation. The only way to deal with this would have been for you to physically move and position yourself at a location where the sun is roughly at your back. Bird photos also generally work better when the head is either parallel to the camera or, better yet, angled ever so slightly toward the viewer to create a more intimate feeling of eye contact. You are at the mercy of the subject here and just have to wait for the decisive moment which, unfortunately, in some situations, will never come. You also generally do not want much of anything obstructing the main body of the subject like the twigs here. Again, the answer here is to move around to see if you can find a less obstructed viewing angle while, of course, also paying attention to the direction of the light. The only other thing I would point out is that you were wise to go to ISO 800 to get your shutter speed up as these little birds are constantly in motion but this has resulted in alot of noise which is especially noticeable in the BG. The good news is since the BG lacks any detail that you care about, you could run a noise reduction program rather aggressively on just the BG and eliminate most of the noise.

Welcome to NPN!

Welcome, Lynne. You have a nice pose and a good catchlight in the eye. I also like the way the angle of the bird works with the angles of the twigs. It's difficult to assess the focus with this small an image. You can post an auxiliary image with 1200 pixels in the long direction and most of us find it useful to do so. The major problem I see with this image is noisiness. You don't mention how you're processing the image, but there should be some kind of noise reduction feature in your software and it would be worth trying it. Many people don't like to use it on the bird itself, but will select the bg and use it on that alone. You could also avoid much of the need to do so by using different settings when photographing. 1/2000 sec is a higher shutter speed than necessary for a perching bird. You could easily go to 1/500 which would allow you to lower your iso correspondingly and result in better image quality.

Keep on taking pictures and posting them and you'll be amazed at how quickly they improve.

Welcome Lynne! I see you've received some great tips so far, so enough said.
Hope to see more of your work this year!

thanks for all the feedback!

Welcome to NPN! I like the background colors! Its hard taking pics of small birds because they fly away right when you get your camera out! But it looks like he stood still for you and it looks nice!