What’s wrong with this picture?

Basically, there is nothing inherently wrong with this image. This is a social flycatcher I captured in a light rain in Costa Rica. The background is attractively out of focus and non-distracting, the bird is sharp, and the exposure is fine. The dark eye surrounded by dark feathers is discernible, and there is a small, subtle catchlight in the eye from the flash I used. One could argue that the bird should have been composed according to the Rule of Thirds, but I often position subjects in the center of the frame and like the results.

The only thing that bothers me is the manmade element. I photographed the flycatcher on the grounds of a lodge I was using, and it was perched on a metal railing. Perhaps this is just my own bias, but I don’t like when I’m photographing nature, wildlife, or birds and there is a manmade element included in the frame. There are exceptions to this -- such as including a weathered split rail fence in a landscape which often looks really good -- but usually I try to eliminate the hand of man.

I recognized this problem as soon as I took the shot, so I photographed a few slender trees on the grounds of the lodge to use in replacing the metal railing. I took shots of several trees with various types of bark to give me a choice in postprocessing.

To suggest the flycatcher was perched on a natural branch, I opened both pictures -- the bird and one of the tree shots -- in Photoshop. I rotated the tree image using the pulldown menu command, Image > Image rotation > 90 Clockwise. It was now horizontal.

I then selected the metal railing using the pen tool. This is the most precise way to make a selection in Photoshop. I was careful to exclude the feet of the bird from the selection. Using Select > modify > feather, I softened the edge of the selection with a one pixel feather radius.

Finally, using the clone tool, I cloned from the tree picture into the selection and completely replaced the metal railing with tree bark from a native Costa Rican tree.§