Snow Day!

Hanging just out my back door upstairs near my work desk at home is a feeder... The birds are going nuts today with all the snow...

A tufted Titmouse also called a Snowbird... how appropriate for today!

This is a male Downy Woodpecker, the smallest woodpecker in North America.

For editing, I pushed the contrast up, pushed up the saturation, cropped in a bit and sharpened using Smart Sharpen.  The lens was a 70-200 f 4-5.6 handheld at 1/200th of a second to keep it sharp and because there wasn't a ton of light, the ISO was bumped up to 4000.  The three elements you need to juggle are shutter speed, aperture and ISO to get the shot you want.

Here is a male Cardinal waiting his turn...  showing the before and after editing...

See how the light meter treats snow on its own?  It doesn't know whether it is looking at a snow pile or a coal pile so everything gets metered as a gray, mid value... 

Levels adjusted, saturation boosted... but not too much!