Yellow-crowned Night-Heron

[Bruce Enns]

Well, I have a whole bunch more weird and wonderful poses of the hunting white morph Reddish Egret, but I suppose I should move on...

This Yellow-crowned Night-Heron actually flew towards me and better light :eek: during my second and last late afternoon at Ding Darling (Nov 23). I took the opportunity to get a close shot that I then cropped into this head and shoulders portrait. This species and the Reddish Egret were life-list addtions for me on this trip.

Comments and critique appreciated, thanks for looking.

Canon 40D, 100-400 L @ 390 mm, AV mode, 1/640s @ f/5.6, ISO 800, handheld

Cheers!
Bruce

I'm not sure what's happening here, but I am uploading a 189KB file, and it ends up being 28.4 KB with some serious jpeg artifacts!?? Anyone else having problems?

[Juan Aragonés]

Bruce I am sure that other members will say that the head turn is not the best but I like it (it is a matter of personal taste, of course) because in this case the eyes and head position seems to concentrate the attention of the observer in the behavior of the heron. In this case, the bird seems to be looking for a prey item. I like the textures of the plumage, the soft light and the good deep of field control. Considering that this is a crop I suggest to go for a different croping with more room at the left and to increase the saturation of the eyes just a bit.

[Doug Brown]

Congrats on adding to your life list! First off, you can post files up to 200 KB; I think there's some JPEG compression artifacting going on here. It doesn't look like you had an overabundance of light, but to me there's not enough DOF to pull off this image. The OOF bill is too prominent. I agree with Juan's other suggestions. Thanks for posting!