Great Egret Mating Ritual

[Bruce Parkinson]

First post on BPN for me. Great Egret Mating Ritual. Houston Audubon Smith Oaks Rookery at High Island, Texas. Nikon D300 Nikkor 300mm F4 AF-S / TC-14E (420mm F5.6)

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2627/4506970928_bb9953539e_o.jpg

[Randy Stout]

Bruce:

A big welcome to BPN, a great place to learn and grow as a bird photographer.

Nice stick exchange here, not always easy to get both head angles good during that action.
Nice job on the whites, well exposed.

There is a fair amount of noise in the image, particularly noticeable in the darker areas like the background.
What ISO were you shooting at?

If your ethics allow, I might consider cloning out a couple of the branches above the birds.

Hope to see more!

Cheers

Randy

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Bruce Big Warm Welcome !!!!! will come back to the image, says currently unavailable !!

[Bruce Parkinson]

Hi Bruce Big Warm Welcome !!!!! will come back to the image, says currently unavailable !!


Oops, fixed it, thanks for the heads up on that. :D

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Welcome Bruce! Nice interaction, good even lighting. Pretty tough getting a clean shot at the rookery, and I've seen, and taken, far worse.
What we really need is the techs on the shot. I'm pretty simplistic; shutter speed, ISO, aperture, exposure mode if not manual. Spending time sorting through a bunch of EXIF is a bit too time consuming, and often there is nothing there when we open the viewer.
Generally using noise reduction on the whole image is not such a good idea. Backgrounds, no problem, but the smoothing from noise reduction destroys those nice feather details in avian images, and a bit of noise is often tolerable. What this means is you'll need to select the subject and apply noise reduction to everything else.
Seems like BPN has had problems this weekend. Sorry about that.
regards~Bill