Plastic

[Old Engineer]

My opinion will not have the weight of the more worthy repliers, but here goes anyway. The colors of the bird do not seem to be noteworthy, The background colors are icky. I like sharp photos in most cases, and here the bird's head seems quite good. It is possible that the depth of field was simply too small for anything better. Making it larger might not have been possible. Altogether then, I think the photographer did as well as can be expected, and, given the situation, I doubt if other photographers could have improved the result at all. Not criticism, just my opinion. I would be proud to have done the photo.

Old Engineer

[penolta]

The head does look too contrasty to me, and there are somespurious blue highlightson the small branches in the upper right. There is also some speckling remaining around the back of the head and the end of the tail visible on my 17" lcd with a hand magnifier. The white flecking on the tail itself may be from wear rather than overprocessing, but you can check that on the original to see if it is there before sharpening. Otherwise it is just ascruffy bird - either molting or with a bad case of mites (it is probably a juvenile and nests are sometimes infested heavily).

[inneyeseakay]

It certainly looks too sharp, but like you said, I don't see any halo's either, but I am only looking at the resized version. I don't think the contrast was overdone too awfully much, but my wife tells me that I often over-PP my pictures too; so what do I know?

Nick