Was it worth it?

Not infrequently, after I process an image, I look at the final product and ask myself, “Was it worth all the time I put into it?”. This is one of those images. A Canada Goose taking a bath at Santee Lakes. This image has been manipulated extensively. I was using too much lens and the bird just barely fit into the frame. I did not need to to that as I was using a zoom lens (100-500 at 420mm), but I did. Also the background was very close so was in focus and very distracting. In post, I expanded the canvas on the bottom to give the goose a little more room. I cropped in a 16:9 aspect for a number of reasons, but primarily because this image will be displayed on my TV at home. The bird was brightened and the BG darkened selectively. Then I used Photoshop’s background blur filter and blurred the BG. Was all of this worth it? Probably not, but it was done at that point. Shot with a Canon R5, SS 1/2500, ISO 5000, f/8.0, EC of 0.