I posted the photos of Charley the Bluejay on the CNPA web site asking for critique of the images, and fellow members and moderators offered the suggestion that the background was too busy with too much detail. I agreed with these observations, and I set about the tedious task of changing the backgrounds of the two photos.
The first step in this process involves creating a virtual copy of the image in Lightroom 4.3 and bringing this copy into Photoshop CS6 for editing. I selected the bird by drawing around it with the mouse, a tedious process which took some time. Once the bird was selected, I selected the inverse (the background) and set about changing the detail which is the source of the problem. First I chose a black background and then a 50% gray background, both of which caused the bird to seem too artificial and not to my liking. I then applied a Gaussian blur filter to the background, and with a setting of about 55 I found that result to be pleasing to my eye. The results are displayed here. As usual, click on the thumbnail to see a full-size image.
Very impressive. I know some ad agencies that would love to have someone with your skill set. 🙂