Shiny!

So, despite rather chilly temperatures (13 C) for the last day of May, wind, and approximately eleven zillion people out for a cystic fibrosis station-counting walk of some kind, I got myself out to the zoo today.

I took 711 pictures. A disturbing fraction of them fail to abjectly suck.

I have a lot of flowers, a lot of butterflies, and probably too many cygnets, but there's rather a lot of other stuff, too.

Some of the other stuff is this splendid fellow, who had been lured into a patch of shrubbery by folks tossing what I hope was popcorn, and whose picture has been scaled but not cropped:
This is an 85% JPEG of a hundred percent crop of the head, after I'd fiddled colour and contrast but no sharpening:

And roughly the same (100% crop, 85% JPEG quality, but not exactly the same 100% crop), after application of unsharp mask. The top version is the post-unsharp mask version.

This is the sort of image that makes me understand why someone wants to print their pictures at 11x17 or larger sizes; there's a whole lot of detail in there, and it can go into the print but not into any generally plausible screen display.