Snowy Egret + redo

Love those wings. The exposure looks spot on and the water coming off the beak adds a lot. A little tight in the frame, but well done.

Nice!
and nice work putting the wing tips back.
You might also try to selectively brighten that right wing.
Still tight in the frame - if you're going to add canvas, might as  well add more on right and left.
Sandy
 

Barbara,
You did a fine job "adding" the wing tips, I would have added some more width.

Large version a must see.  Great shot of this magnificent egret. I like everything about it, including your addition of canvas and wing tips.  Nice!

Barbara:

This is a very nice pose.  I understand why you like it.  Nice work adding the canvas, but the image is still too tight in the frame.  Since you done that much work, I'd do more and get enough room around the bird to make it work.  It is probably the shooting angle, but the image also looks like it is tilted and needs a CW rotation.  I would also brighten up the bird.  I checked and the whites of the bird are largely down in the 180 range and could easily go to 210 or a bit higher.  I tried it and the bird looked much better.
 

Barbara, I took some of the comments below and made a few tweaks to your image. I hope you don't mind. 

The adjusted version is super!

Jerry, I don't mind at all, and that is beautiful.  I will do a redo of the image later on and see how it turns out.  Thank you!

Really nice work, Barbara, and I agree with all the suggestions.  Jerry's revision is excellent.  The only other suggestion I'd make is to maybe dodge the face and neck slightly relative to the rest of the bird-not much or it will look artificial, but just enough to give them a bit more prominence.

Here's my first attempt at a redo.  It still doesn't look exactly like Jerry's.  I can't seem to get that silvery, shiny look to the water, and I used Curves to lighten the bird, but maybe I should have used something else.

If anyone has any suggestions or further feedback, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you again!

Barbara,
Great re-post

Beautiful image Barbara.  Your repost is wonderful!  Excellent!

The latest iteration is very impressive, Barbara, well done! I’m something of a ‘nit picker’ so here are few suggestions, all aimed at being constructive. The frame could do with yet further CW rotation – place a vertical guide through the topmost point of the right leg and rotate the frame until the reflection is exactly below that point. There is a disturbing ‘package’ behind the bird that should be removed. Take some steps to unify the tonality of the BG and reestablish its original degree of contrast with the bird's right wing – ‘paint out’ the darker smudged area toward the lower left corner and clone in a few ripples.
David 
 

For some reason Barbara I prefer Jerry's repost. It seems overall brighter to me. I'm sure you can get there with some experimentation. It is a dynamic image, well worth the trouble of extra processing to make it the best it can be.  

I like your repost, Barbara.  I do agree that Jerry's has a glow that yours doesn't quite achieve, but he's always had gorgeous water in his images-you might send him a note asking how he does it.  I do see that his image is considerably warmer than yours which might be part of it.  As Steve mentioned, this is well worth the effort.  I think this is one of those images I'd put in a special folder to come back to time and again as my processing skills evolve, just to see nuances I could pull out of it. (An, no, I don't have such a folder, but I think I'll make one now that I've thought of it).