Female Northern Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis

This image is from March 03, 2013. The birds were on a feeding frenzy as the snow was falling. This female Northern Cardinal stopped long enough to allow me this fairly crisp image from her perch on the deck railing about six to eight feet from my camera. I imaged this Cardinal in rural upstate Columbia County, New York, USA. For this image, I used my manual focus Tamron Adaptall-2 model 55BB SP 500mm f8 Tele Macro mirror lens with attached Tamron Adaptall-2 Pentax K M mount on Pentax K20D body, manually focused. hand held at the camera with the lens barrel resting on the window sill and pointed out the opened bathroom window, Shake Reduction set to 500mm, ISO 400, f8, 1/125 sec., with available ambient light. This full resolution large JPEG was edited in FastStone to slightly lighten the shadows to bring out some eye detail.