I remember taking this image south of DC in Virginia back in December 2002. I spent lots of time on this image, carefully drawing around the bird and the branch to mask it off and blur the background. A print of this image has been hanging on my wall for most of the time since then.

Now blurring the background takes five seconds in Photoshop. I marvel often how far editing tools have come in the past 20 years. But Adobe's "AI" isn't perfect. The loose bark hanging off the branch at left in the original confused the AI and it blurred the top but not the bottom. I ended up just removing all of it.

Reprocessed

The image that has been on my site for years.