u/WheelsofPop

This was a very challenging photo to take.

Shot on Nikon D5100 with a 70-300mm non-VR lens I bought on resale (autofocus does not work). Sunbirds are comparable in size to Hummingbirds, only slightly larger. Getting the focus right was a moment of pure joy.

As for editing, very minimal editing was done in Darktable. Some local contrast on the bird and color boost on the iridescent feathers.

There were a couple of blurry branches in the foreground, removed them with GIMP.

All these were done on a laptop with a very bland and inaccurate LCD panel. The final tweaks were done using Adobe Lightroom Mobile. The amoled on my phone gives a much better idea of what to tweak. Added a slight vignette with heavy feathering to draw the eye on the bird.

Exif: 1/1250 | f/5/6 | 300mm (450mm equiv on APS-C) | ISO 400

Will add in camera JPEG for comparison in the comments.

This photo is an unexpected favorite of mine... Darktable was used to remove ugly color fringing (green and magenta) on the branches and to darken the duck as it was quite some distance away and looked hazy (on a foggy morning). Used GIMP to remove minor distractions in the water and to even out some hues (bottom right had slight vignetting. didn't remove it completely, just made it less noticeable)