LiamD I like your enthusiasm and willingness to share. You take some wonderfull shots, and like me, you take risks. That willingness face rejection is what seperates leaders from the pack. While I didn't graduate, I was still the guy that showed up at the prom with the prom queen. I wouldn't want to be the guy standing along the wall wishing...
my point?
Next time I'm sure your image will be better "post processing", and my advice would be this:
How many good, frame filling, close-up, tacksharp, images of waterfowl are there?
There needs to be something extra special about the light, or the animals behavior or situation, or moment, to raise the image to the next level.
case in point:
I saw an image a few weeks back that wowed me..
I've seen nice shark pics, and I've seen nice surffer pics, but I've never seen an image like the one of a surffer going into the barrel with the silohuett of a great white in the wave right behind him....

I seem to recall some photogs on my tour of Great Slave Lake stacking teleconverters AND extension tubes on thier canikon bodies with 4-600mm (prime) lenses for close-ups.....

Mattmattic said:Sadly I must confess I consider a snort of Gigglenflich to be a real treat...

I Ride a yamaha fj1200 because I cannot afford a suzuki hyabusa, or bmw 1200r....
I build model planes because I cannot afford to build real ones.
I can't afford to go heliskiing or skydiving this year...

God's not trying to keep me poor, He's just trying to keep me Alive!
lol javascript:emoticon('')

Nice crystal looks just like the one I'm holding in the image on my site...I gotta get me hands on som-o-dat scotch too, now. And I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that one has to get drunk to like it...but a mans gotta do what a mans gotta do....I'll try it...even if I have to get drunk in the process.

I only use raw-adobe rgb in studio, or for formal wedding shots. I can justify the extra steps and time there. but for all other jobs I use jpeg and srgb to simplify workflow. any psds are done in the original colorspace as there no gain in taking a shot done in srgb to adobe rgb, but there is a loss when you go the other way around, and saved as psds (or tiffs, if sending out for printing). All web, dvd, proofs are jpeg/srgb unless there's a reason to do anything else.

are you using srgb? I run a mac and have color calibration set-up. I present multimedia dvd's to my clientel and have a crt, lcd monitor as well as 21 inch tv and 15" lcd tv, in order to verify my discs. Png seems to be an apple happy format that is adopted standard for web and should look fine on any browser. Not as popular as jpeg, but had it's following with many web developers.

For those that want to try ... all I did was copy&paste the bird, into a new layer flip it vertically, resize the canvas, copy and paste the edges of the water, a little cloning and levels adjustment on each layer, before flattening the image. Cropped it then applied the liquify filter with a few quich swipes of the tablet pen to merge the ripples, and then a gausian blur on the reflected bird. a couple gradient fill layere (one b&w for contrast control) one gradient blu for filter, a little brush stroke to vinette and finally a hue saturation layer and a levels layer. Total time =10 mins.
Were that a customers work time would be 1-3 hrs and alot more attention to detail...kimbos right little details like the wing tip....colors and blending of the sepereate layers...
but the gimp, and elements can do this job just fine.

Thank you for the compliment, but I must point out two things:
A) There an old computer saying- garbage in- garbage out... that means to get something good out you have to start with something good, and that shot was better than good on it's own merits...
B) I only teaked it as a proof of concept, It'd take alot more time and effort to get it right...I was merely illustrating what I said was possible.

ok george but two caveats:
1) I was not trying to criticise your image- in fact I complimented it.
2) I'll just mock-up the concept to show what might be done, but cannot take the time to do a great job.

impeccable timing.
don't say "if only", say "photoshop". copy, flip, rotate, opacity, liquify, and Finish it. Create the clipped area, and blow it up and print it and frame it.