Happy Holidays

Our warm fall came to a sudden end and the warmth has been replaced with bitter cold and lots of snow.  I wish that this image had a slightly brighter and more festive color scheme, but reality often comes at a cost. I do like how this one turned out.  A few cowbirds are hanging around the feeders and this female was sitting in the perfect spot so I fired away through the kitchen window. It was fairly dark and the image was about a stop under exposed so I had to do a fair amount of noise reduction in Lightroom. I used levels to push the exposure to go high key, ran some luminosity masks on dark 2's and midtones, and finished the image with some brightness and contrast.  The jpeg had a slight red tinge to the snow so I lowered the saturation of the reds before posting.  Happy Holidays...........................Jim

K5 IIs 300 mm f4, natural early morning light (1/200 sec at f9.0, ISO 800)!

And thank you to all of the folks that provided critiques and suggestions  throughout the year.