This is exactly the kind of response I like seeing here. Thank you for your time and thoughtfulness. I like your process and will try it out. Meanwhile, we have a tentative date and I will contact you privately.

Thank you for clarifying. You are right about exposing for the birds but exactly how do you do that for small objects moving quickly?

I will be at Green Cey and Wakodahatchee in a few weeks.

Did you take this picture? The solid white sky looks phony. In the few times I have been to Green Cey, I never saw a sky like that.

Look again. I stopped posting because most of the feedback was uninformative. If you read my posts, you will see that I try to help others with their work based upon sixty years of experience. I also reserve the right to voice my opinion. Sorry if you do not like it; that is your right.

And just why do we really need such software?

This is Birkenau which was the main murder camp in the Auschwitz complex. True about the vanishing points. Despite the starkness of the shot, the composition adds no new insight. The sky is badly burned out while the foreground and building are a bit too dark for my liking. The monochromaticity of the shot reinforces the starkness. While color is the real way we experience the word, in this case, it understates the horrors that occurred beyond that building.

Thanks for posting. Never again....

Lesson learned. If anyone does not want critiques on postings, then please say so politely in the original post.

Curmudgeon, you aced this. This is exactly the kind of discussion I like seeing. One can really learn from this. Thanks for taking up my challenge. For the large part, I agree with you but here are my comments. Please feel free to respond or not.

#1 Agree about stem being in the way. Would have cropped it so that the bird were more centered. I would have to play with it to show what I would have preferred.
#2 Same as 1. The reflection does not interest me so I would have cropped it out. Those stems ruin the image and I would not have taken time to remove them and their shadows. I would not have shown either. Both are nice and sharp.
#3 Do not like the cropping and having the back of the parrot being so prominent. That striking head deserves much more attention. Not the right "pose" for this beautiful subject.
#4 Really stunning. So refreshingly sharp. BIF's are really difficult to get right but this one has it all, almost. The wing position is great. You see the majesty of this bird. Look at how the face pops. Background is not distracting but could have been cropped in a more interesting manner. I would have added a slight negative vignette to get the bird to pop more. Definitely worth printing and hanging. A picture to be proud of, not the others.
The rest. Wonderful action shots thanks to the high shutter speeds. However, their poor focus ruins all of them. They should have been as sharp as #4. Like I said, BIF's are hard to get right. You might want to check your set up to see why the sharpness is off. The first four show you can get sharp pictures. Perhaps the autofocus missed the mark or your depth of field was too shallow.

End of story.

I stopped posting because my posts lead to no interesting discussions and I think emojis or simple one or two responses were thoughtless and useless. Several other people complained of the same thing and encouraged viewers to express why they thought the way they did. Such discussions help people like myself grow as photographers. Emojis simple stroke the ego. Too many of these threads seem to be rah-rah sessions with little interest in dissent.

If you wish, I go through all your pictures and tell you why I responded the way I did.

Since I was not learning anything from the pictures I posted, then perhaps I could help others. I do not apologize for this. This should provoke an interesting discussion.

Thank you for your explanation. You gave a lot of thought to this. I disagree with the result but not the intent. The result looks more like something you would see in an ad rather than conveying a more natural look. Given your explanation, my only other comment is that I think the wrestler is a bit too dark.

Thank you for posting and engaging in a good discussion.

Some very interesting shots here but the one of the cormorant is the only one that is a good photograph.

Why does the subject pop so much from the background? The effect here is very artificial and ruins what might be a good photograph. Please post the original shot without adjustments if you want my suggestions on this.

You are welcome. No different than any of the others.

Very much better. I wonder if the skin is too warm/red/saturated. What do you think? Have you thought of playing around with the cropping? Perhaps "move" him more to the left, possibly with cropping him slightly and then adding some of that black background to the right?

This is definitely worth printing and framing. A great shot of Jim at an interesting point in his life.