Great Egret

[Glenn Pure]

174696
Taken in early morning light at a coastal lake in southern New South Wales (Lake Curalo - a favourite spot that I try to get to early in the morning each time we get down the coast). Nothing special here but a good chance to practice a bit of flight photography. Fairly small crop for composition only.

As always, thank you for looking and for any comments you are kind enough to share.

Technical: Canon 80D with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/4000 sec, f7.1, ISO 1000. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 3, crop, lighting adjustments, NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Modest NR to bird and stronger NR to background. Bird only sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian Blur) after final size reduction.

[gail bisson]

Hi Glenn,
Everything looks good except his head is slightly turned away from us and that causes the head to be in shadow.
The whites look good with not too much yellow in them from the early light.
Very sharp and good comp,
Gail

[Bill Dix]

Great flight position; love the wings almost touching the water. Good exposure on the bright white wings. Only nit is that the slightest head turn would have improved the light on the face.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Good shot I agree had the head not been pointing away... anyway we can't change what it is, the brightest whites I would suggest could be lowered a little with luminosity to reveal a tiny bit more detail. I don't mind the shadow on the right wing.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Glenn, well exposed on the whites, and I like how the near wing is touching the water. These guys are graceful flyers, so one can capture a range of flight poses as they fly past your lens. Head turn already mentioned.

[Glenn Pure]

Thank you Gail, Bill, Jon and Stu. I agree the head angle not ideal but in terms of reason, I actually thought the slight shadowing provided extra shape and form and liked that aspect. But then, I'm much less experienced than you all. In general, I'm not a great fan of direct light from behind the camera as it flattens the subject too much. A little angle is always nice from my perspective to provide some shadows, shape and form.