The Snowy Egret's Arrival

[Daniel Belasco]

Taken yesterday evening. A Tricolored Heron watches the arrival of a Snowy Egret at The Pond.

canon 1dMKIIN 100-400 f5.6 @ 310mm f7.1 1/1000 sec iso 800


http://newimages.fotopic.net/?iid=11ap69&outx=600&noresize=1&nostamp=1

[Desmond Chan]

Hi, Daniel, first thing that strikes me is there seems to be a blue cast in this image. Not sure about what environment you took this photo in, I'm not sure if there is something nearby that caused the cast. But it also seems to me it could be difficult to have every whites in the egret look pure white given the light and the reflection in the water. So I assume that there will be some color cast on the white feathers somewhere regardless.

As presented, I think I would either darken and blurred the heron quite a bit or simply crop that part of the picture out. I would also consider either clone out the leaves in the water behind the egret or at least darken them so they would be less visible. Forgot to add that all these are for helping the viewers focus more on the egret. The egret looks to me could use some sharpening, too.

I like the reflection of the light - pretty color - in the water and the pose of the egret. It also seems to me you had an interesting environment to photograph in.

My $0.20.

[Daniel Cadieux]

It should be easy to remove the blue cast to the egret's plumage. Since there is no blue close to it just loosely select the egret, then reduce the saturation of the blue and cyan channels. Voila!

Fill-flash would have done wonders to illuminate the face and underwings. I would also add more room below, if you have it, since I find the lower water ring rather close to the edge. I'm OK with the OOF heron, but would have liked if you could have gone wider on the zoom to include it all (I know, the action comes too quickly sometimes to react in time:)). Nice pose on the egret, and I like the bits of vegetation.

[Daniel Belasco]

This was taken late in the evening when I take most of my photos. I always get a blueish cast as the light fades. I never know how much to remoe since the light in the evening doeesn't have the same color characteristics as mid day.
Daniel. Yes I have more room below, but didn't quite get all of the reflection, so I cut it off short. I'll have to reexamine the orginal. The OOF Heron was what I was focusing on when out of nowhere the Egret arrives and this image was the best of the lot. That's all of the Heron I got. I would normally crop it out, but including it seemed different to me. Always searching for something different.
Desmond. As far as sharpening the Egret--I have done the opposite and used DeNoise 3 to de-sharpen the image. I like a smooth overall "painting-like" image and not big on overall sharpness. Kinda going for the mood here.
Thanks for the comments above--there's much appreciated.