Great White Egret

[Manjesh Lingamurthy]

Wakodahatchee Wetlands, Delray Beach, FL

Nikon D300
Nikkor 200-400MM F4 AFS VR
F5.6 1/2500
ISO 200
Manual Metering

[Fabs Forns]

Very close to perfect. Two things keep it for me. Eye partially covered and shadow in the neck. Other than that and to my taste, sweet as can be. Perfect whites, wingspread and BG, congrats!

[Troy Lim]

Majesh, nice shot. f5.6 in this case worked for your shot. You nailed it.

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Excellent exposure and detail and I love the mating eye and feathers captured in this image/ Excellent timing and beautiful action. fine work Manjesh !! Thanks for sharing.

[Gail Spitler]

When I opened this image, I said, Wow!!! It is wonderful, a totally gorgeous great egret image except .... for the darn stick that is so close to the eye. The exposure is perfect, the feathers take your breath away.
Cheers
Gail

[Paul Lagasi]

Manjesh lovely image, to bad about the stick...depending on your PP skills it can be made into a passable image..
I know some people don't, I really enjoy recovering images
I played with your image, hope you don't mind...
I had an old image of an egret in breeding green, copied it used the transform key and sized it, then cloned to clean up, eye and green, shortened the stick at both ends, tried to remove the shadow on neck, all I had at work is my laptop so colors may be off a bit..
Don't give up on this image..its very saveable..especially if next time your out you can get a head image at roughly the same angle

[Daniel Cadieux]

Stick clipping the eye issue already mentioned, but otherwise way cool image! I even like the square comp. Perhaps some NR to the BG is all else that is needed.

P.S. Good job Paul!!

[Manjesh Lingamurthy]

Hi Paul

I will not remove or add anything into my images. I try to keep my photoshop workflow to a minimum and I do most of it in ADOBE RAW. These usually include minimal adjustment in exposure(I try to get a good exposure to start with while I am shooting and I set the aperture and shutter speed manually most of the times), highlights, shadows, brightness, contrast, clarity, vibrance and sometimes hue/saturation. Once I open up it in photoshop, I do crop for a better composition and a double pass sharpening. I try to keep the ISO as low as possible, all the time, to minimise noise.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great pose, exposure control, sharpness and the stick adds interest. I don't mind the little bit of missing eye here. I would only desaturate the BG a few points, particularly the greens and blur the BG a bit more.