It's difficult to describe, but the right hand trees in particular look rather over sharpened. This gives it an odd look on my monitor, not dissimilar to overdone HDR.

The polariser may have been a contributary factor, compounded by the processing.

Personally I'd have shot this without the polariser and limited the PP work to levels and no more than 50% sharpening in Unsharp Mask. It's all relative, but the process you describe is much more than the minimalist approach I would take.

What we don't know is how much the lack of resolution on screen is affecting this, and it may well be that when printed it will look entirely different.

The judging is complete and the winner is chosen!

Many thanks all for making such an interesting selection of images.

This one does look a bit overdone...

Something slightly longer than a standard length is recommended for portraiture.

A 50mm lens is a nice length on a DSLR such as the *istDS.

Sometimes these e-mails are caught in whatever ant-spam mechanism you may have. I would check the spam or trash folder.

Yes, well made, handles well and so far the results are good. I'll reserve final judgement for when the first A3 prints are made, but it looks fine.

A Pentax 100-400mm or something similar would be a very nice addition to the range. The extra pull of 400mm is useful, although it does make it clear that there is no substitute for getting closer to the subject. For small birds at any real distance, nothing would be long enough.

Today I spent several hours at Martin Mere, testing the Tokina 80-400mm. I've chosen a sample to show you here. This Mandarin Duck was shot on a K20D, 400 ISO, Cloudy, JPEG Premium, 135mm, f5.6, 1/60 sec.
[IMG]http://i240.photobucket.com/albums/ff250/johnriley1uk/043-Mandarin-Duck.jpg[/IMG]

The old answer would be to send the printer a copy of the print you like and tell them that's what you want. They should be able to do that.

Otherwise, tell them what colour profile you are using and they should be able to sort that out.

Or ask them for their preferred colour profile and download it.

Don't be "fobbed off" by them - if they are so hi-tech they should be able to make a simple print of the right colour!

There aren't many Classifieds in the magazine these days, I guess the way people sell has moved on.

Welcome to the forum!