Another House Wren

Lovely image with a great singing pose and moody BG. I'd give it an extra round of sharpening

Jason,
I like this composition and the crop you selected. The Wren could stand some select sharpening to bring out a bit more detail.
Well done . . .

Jason: A ver nice image of the bird with a nice pose and background. The bird is pretty soft. Sharpening might help some but something else is off during capture.

A good capture and nice background, Jason, but the bird is soft, as others have noted. I don't know if you can sharpen it enough in post-processing. I'd suggest photos of graph paper or something to determine if you have camera/lens issues. Or do a hard reset of the 7D to see if it's a software problem.

Thanks for all the comments! I am having a hard time seeing why the image is soft? To me, the image is sharp (considering I am using a $1000 Sigma compared to a $10,000 Canon lens). I don't know that I can get the results of a high end glass, but I'm not going to stop trying. I use Lightroom 3 as my post processing software. Maybe there are some tips to the sharpening tools that you guys might know. It seems that if I increase sharpening too much, the noise becomes and issue. Then, the noise reduction tool can cause the image to appear soft again.
Thanks for the advice on a software reset Jim. I will look into that. Also, the 7d has an option for micro adjustments. Would that help with this? Keep the advice coming!! Thanks

Jason: I read your comments about image softness. Evaluating image sharpness with birds is really pretty easy. If you can't see clear feather detail, the image isn't as sharp as it could be. This is assuming it was exposed properly to begin with and proper technique was used to capture the frame. No amount of digital post processing can make up for images that weren't focused accurately in the field. Clearly birds in flight are an additional challenge for tack sharp images, but with modern AF systems, that has become easier as well compared to the manual focus days. Your 7D is certainly a capable camera with a very solid AF system. So.... is it the lens? I don't know. I would do some tests with static subjects, using a solid tripod and look critically at image sharpness. Photograph a dollar bill taped to wall as an example and evaluate the results. Try it with the AF system enabled, then try it by turning off the AF system, turn on live view, press the + button so you are looking at a 5x magnification and manually focus. Compare the results of the image taken with AF and the Manual focus. If the AF image is soft, then it is possible the lens is either back focusing or front focusing which is exactly what the Micro-adjustment controls designed to correct. I won't try to describe the details and techniques to figure out what needs to be done via micro adjustments here. Let's find out if it is the AF system with your Sigma lens. Your lens is capable of producing sharp (certainly much sharper) images than this example. Technique is critical with longer lenses as well. Here's a link to an image I posted a couple of years ago and the discussion on sharpness and cropping. This image is only 11.9% of the original frame. Sample Image

Interesting framing, Jason. At first I was going to say it seemed like an awful lot of room on the right, but after looking at it for awhile, I found I liked it this way-makes it seem like he's singing in a concert hall.

Keith and Jim gave you some excellent suggestions on checking for focus issues.