So, I decided if I was going to be a bird photographer I needed to learn a little more about birds. Taking a Life Long Learning class on birds has helped me to see that I was even more ignorant than I knew. Take for example the spotted towhee which, it turns out, is a very common bird in these parts and a year round resident. Yet I had never seen one before. Perhaps because I wasn’t looking.
In any case this one was a good poser. One of the challenges of bird photography is that most of them refuse to hold still. In post processing I added detail and sharpness, a little saturation and emphasized the bird with a darken/lighten center filter.