First off the pose of the animal is very grand, and his eyes are very clear. Eyes are always the most essential part of photography that involves animals as it makes 'the connection'

The only element of the photo I do not like is the harsh angle of the logs branch being cut off, i understand for this photo that you have little control over that but it is the only clear indication that this animal is shot in a man made controlled environment rather than the wild.

Moving on from the photo, lets talk about the technical aspects of it, something is not sitting right with me when it comes to the contrast and sharpness of this image. It appears that the levels have been a bit too compressed, its given the image a edgy feel to it, if this is what you were going for than thats fine, but it does not appear to be a natural image rather a heavily processed one.

Another thing is the background has these weird looking Morie effects, these could be from shooting through a chain link fence or they could be from oversharpening its hard to tell in the photo what the case is.

I am going to assume it is over sharpening and give you a good fix for it, Sharpening should always be the VERY last step before saving an image, meaning you have sized the image for presentation wether print or web and you are ready to save the final

Telephoto lenses and there limited depth of feild present unique challenges when sharpening an image, we only want to sharpen the areas that are in focus, applying sharpness to background blur only adds black artifacts and degrades from the smoothness and natural colors of the out of focus areas that are often the majority of the image in a telephoto shot.


Therefor we want to isolate the infocus areas from the background witht he following steps,

In photoshop create an additional layer of the image by hitting CTRL-J than sharpen the fur details to your liking. be sure to avoid black lines or over sharpening the details. Once this is done take the eraser to the layer you just made, set the hardness down lower and erase 'around the animal' it may help to put a temporary back layer behind the layer you are erasing to see the cut out better.

What you will do by doing this is you are sharpening the infocus areas that can benefit from the additional sharpness but leaving the background unsharpened, the background is blurry to begin with because of the lenses depth of feild so any sharpenign to this area will degrade from the image quality.

If the effects on the image are from a chainlink fence and this is present in your orginal image the inverse is a quick fix create a mask of the fur areas than blur the background just enough to remove the artifact but still remain natural.