No post-processing except for the usual levels, white balance, and sharpness adjustments.
Nowadays, people look at this photo and assume the background was manipulated in Photoshop, which sadly has now become the generic name for photographic post-processing.
In fact, the strange, painterly look of non-centered items is the result of shooting with a very long lens at a very wide aperture through a mess of plants. The center of the lens had a clear view to the head of the quail, which looks off center here because I cropped the image. The twigs and leaves between the quail and the rest of the lens interrupt light transmission and act like a diffusion filter, and shallow depth of field from the wide aperture blurs the background. Might make a mess of a landscape, but I like the way it works for this portrait.
Physics also played a role here, but let us never speak of it.
