Loon feeding

[Keith Carver]

Common loon feeding crayfish to 2-month-old molting juvenile, Damariscotta Lake, Maine. Brown feathers on juvenile head, wings and back will be replaced entirely by gray feathers within a month or so. Full late afternoon sun.

1DM3, 500mm IS, 1.4X, ISO 800, f/10, 1/640, -1.3 EV (to reduce hot whites on breast feathers) PP: NR on BG, USM on birds 135/0.25/0. Pano crop.

C&C appreciated.

[Juan Aragonés]

Keith I like the pano croping and the timing a lot. A better head angle of the juv would be great but I think that the timing makes this image, not the head angle of the juvenile.

[Randy Stout]

Keith:

Nice moment captured, and thanks for the age of the juvi, helps me appreciate their developmental phases.

Your EC choice was good, as the dark water was going to really blow the whites if you went with the cameras metering. There are a smattering of hot areas in the whites, but in this light, I think you did very well.

Nice display of the green sheen on adults chest.

From a comp standpoint, I might suggest trying to get them off the horizontal midline a bit, by cropping up from the bottom and adding a bit to the top if you have it.

You clipped the adults tail. If you don't have it in the original, I would go ahead and crop him in to he was about the same as the juvi, re: truncation of the body.

Per Artie: "Cut, don't clip"

If you can , post your images to the max size allowed, this one is only 100 Kb, so the quality suffers for it.

Hope to see more!

Randy

[Stu Bowie]

A tender moment captured in this, and well timed for the feeding. I agree with Randy regarding the comp.

[Keith Carver]

Thanks for the crop suggestion, implemented in this repost. I like it much better.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Keith I much prefer the cropped repost, but I would still like to see less room below. Nice food exchange...I do wish for better angle on the chick (yes, that can be difficult to get on these types of images). Good job on the exposure. On the repost I see that you removed some magenta but perhaps compensated a little too much on the green. Somewhere between the 2 would be ideal IMO. You could also tone down some of the sheen on the bill - use the clone stamp at 25-30% opacity and clone in some of the neighbouring dark pixels.

[Keith Carver]

Thanks, Daniel, very helpful. The re-repost: (a) cropped per suggestion, (b) moderated the green cast, (c) some specular highlights cloned out on upper mandible of adult. The juv HA - hmmm, that will have to wait until next time... ;o)

[Daniel Cadieux]

OK. Crop is now perfect, as is the fix on the bill's sheen. But now you went much too far on the magenta side! Out of the three the original is best as far as WB goes.

[Ramon M. Casares]

I like the tighter crop but the colors on my monitor are look better on the OP. Congratulaitons and a great natural moment, lovely species and atutides and interaction.
Congratulaitons!

[sree.kumar.h]

I like the colours on the Orginal image. The droplets on the head look great. The composition is better in the first re-post.