Ah, I can see a white blob now.
Zooming in on the original its a mini-waterfall, but it needs removing as it is a bit distracting.

Thanks

Graham. Thanks for the comment, I like people pointing things out before they go before judges - then I don't get the 'Doh I wish I'd noticed that' moment.

Which water flow do you find distracting? The 3rd from the left is a very thick one. Looking at it again the very weedy left hand one looks a bit distracting to me.

It makes me feel a bit queasy looking at it.
But a good composition, and nice strange effect.

Thanks Paul and Barrie.

One thing I struggle with is the brightness of my screen.
I think (!) I have calibrated it, but images seem quite dark. So when I have quite subtle tones I'm not sure how other people see them.

For example the colour one looks OK to me, but the colours may be washed out on somebody else's screen. (Like my one at work).

Paul, I think I will play around with the Mono conversion, and try to get some separation between the greens and the oranges.

Roughton Linn Waterfall.
Colour or Mono or shouldn't have bothered

I would recommend going along to a few different camera clubs as a guest, and see how friendly they are, and what they do.

I would also suggest that you check their programme to make sure that you go along on an evening where there is a lecture that interests you. There's nothing worse than going along on a duff evening, even the members will admit you get a few of those

You can find a list of most of the camera clubs in Britain here link and click on member federations. (The federations websites are pretty dire, don't let that put you off, just look for the list of member clubs).

I joined a club 14 months ago and I think I have improved a lot, other people may beg to differ

My improvement has been through going on all the trips they organise, talking to lots of people, visiting photographic exhibitions, showing people my images and asking for critique, and entering all of the competitions.

You may find that camera club images are of a quite different style from the images you see elsewhere and from the type you currently take.
If you look on my Flickr gallery (link in signature) most of my images were taken for camera club competitions.

All the best whatever you decide to do.

Interesting image, and excellent gallery.

I had exactly the same problem with this setup (100-300 and 1.4x).

I sent the TC back to warehousepexress, and they sent me a replacement.

Replacement had same problem, so I sent it back to Sigma. They found a problems with some gears and fixed it FOC.

Tim

Thanks for all your comments.

Unfortunately he did not appear again last night!!

I had the lens hood jammed right up against the window on a sturdy tripod, and as it was quite late at night there were no reflections or glare on the glass.
I think the noise reduction blurred the background even more, and I selective sharpened the bird a little, which taken together makes it appear a little sharper than it really is.

Thanks for that Jonathan. I've seen your wildlife images and they're excellent, so if 1600 is good enough for you its good enough for me.

I just used Photoshop's NR for this one, but used the advanced section and just the green channel as the background is all green and that is where the noise was.

I have my tripod setup ready to to try to bag him tonight, unfortunately he appears to come anywhere in a 2 hour timeframe, so its rather a long wait.