Judges Comments

A nice animal portrait of a really unusual subject. The image is well exposed and evenly lit, there is a catch light in the eye and the bird and branch are well positioned in the frame.
There is good detail in most of the bird with only the back foot and the tail fading into the DOF blur. This is a hard balance to achieve as the background elements are still quite identifiable
and I would like to have seen them blurred further. It might improve the image if the light areas in the top right and bottom left were darkened as this would bring more attention to the subject.