My Nemesis

[Julie Kenward]

It's not often I get to be in this forum and it's certainly a rarity that I would show up with a Great Blue Heron image so I guess you could say it was a good afternoon!

I made about 150 images of him today - most were out of the range of my 70-200mm lens but a few came out okay. (This was a rare instance where a GBH came close enough to the edge of the pond for me to even get a decent capture without spying me and flying away. This guy must have been seriously hungry!)

The colors on the lake are from the changing autumn scenery. I did a pretty big crop and then some minor tweaks in levels and curves. I also did a gaussian blur on the BG to tone down all the intricate reflections.

Canon 40D, 70-200mm f/4L USM
f/7.1 @ 1/320th, ISO 400
Center-weighted metering, Manual mode
Handheld, natural late afternoon light

[Doug Brown]

Congrats on getting a nemesis bird Julie! By coincidence, I actually got a decent frame of my nemesis bird today (a Belted Kingfisher). The water is nice, but the gaussian blur is doing some strange things to the image that make it look not quite right. The bird appears to be somewhat blurred around the edges, and the bubbles beneath the bird should be as sharply focused as the bird is.

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Julie, I like the COMP and the BKGR and the EXP but the bird does not look sharp at all to me. Not sure what is going on as your stuff is usually tack sharp (when you want it to be). BTW, the edged feathers indicate that this bird is a juvenile.

[Julie Kenward]

Yeah, I think I'll have to go back to the drawing board on this one. On my monitor it looked oversharpened before I even applied sharpening but now not so much. I'll look at some of the other images I took and try again!

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Great to seeing you posting here Julie and congrats on seeing a GBH. I agree with the above comments and willl look forward to seeing your future posts of this heron. Were you standing up on a bank to capture this one as it appears that you were looking down. Many thanks for sharing.

[Julie Kenward]

Judy, he was in a small pond that feeds off of a small lake and I was on the gravel path between the two. Unfortunately, I had nowhere but water below me (no sloping bank) and was afraid to crouch down because he was literally 20 feet away stalking his dinner - I didn't want to make any fast moves that would interrupt that.

[Ramon M. Casares]

The probelm that I see here is that you have blurred all the water, even the areas that should be in focus, and that is giving this shot a strange feel.