Great Blue Heron Catches Shad

[Allen Sparks]

Canon 40D, Tamron 200-500
@427mm, 1/1600, f8, -2/3 EC, ISO 400

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Very nice catch, I like the head angle and the fish adds a lot to it. The bird appears rather soft on my monitor. Did you run NR on it? If not, another round of sharpening might help.

[Harshad Barve]

Looks like you have applied NR on entire image ,
Lovely catch for both of you.
TFS

[Allen Sparks]

You guys don't miss a thing. Yes, I applied NR to the entire image and given this is a cropped image adds to the softness. I'm a newbie to Post Processing :) ....

[Tony Whitehead]

Great catch, Allen. Focus looks good - softness mentioned. Some strange bokeh in the BG with angled parallel lines on OOF twigs and specular highlights - would clean up relatively easy to be less eye-catching.

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Allen, First off, thanks for your membership support.

This is a perfect example of an exciting situation where the photographer did everything right (sharp, right on sun angle, fish) in the field but the resulting image has a multitude of problems (some of which were mentioned above).

Without looking back:

1-the light is high and harsh
2-the BKGR is distracting
3-with the fish tail curved towards us and fore-shortened it looks as if the fish has no tail.
4-there is no room for the virtual legs as presented

Except for item 4, there was nothing that you could have done except look for a better situation. I do understand that that is more of a problem in Memphis than it is in Florida. :)