Egret with Dragonfly

[John Guastella]

Taken at the San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, Irvine, CA.

While I was observing this Snowy Egret fishing, a dragonfly nonchalantly flew by me towards the Egret. A little too nonchalantly, as it turned out: the bird snapped the dragonfly out of the air in an instant!

I had a heck of a time with the exposure on this photo. I worked on the bird and background in PS CS5 using a combination of Levels, the Burn tool and Nik Viveza. NR on the entire image during RAW conversion (ACR 6.2) and a bit more just on the BG via TDN5.

I cloned out a rock in the lower LC of the image. I decided to leave in the rock at the mid-left, but did darken it to make it less obtrusive. Lastly, I gave the image a 2º CW rotation.

Canon 7D with the 400mm f/5.6 lens. Manual exposure; f/6.3; 1/1,000 sec; ISO 100.

Thanks for looking!

John

[Randy Stout]

John:
Nice capture, of something I haven't seen before.
To my eye, the whites are too gray or underexposed looking. I think they could go noticeably brighter without blowing. A bit more space below if you have it for the 'virtual feet'

Feel free to post the original image, without post processing, so we can see where you started. Often leads to good discussions about post processing options.

Cheers

Randy

[Scott Frye]

Interesting pose and looks good with the dragon fly -- but I would like to see more detail in the whites. I did a search on original input of Egrets to see what folks were doing with Exposure Compensation (Canon term and think the Nikon equivalent is EV) -- and most folks shoot the big white birds with -2/3 or /1 EC to hold detail in the whites -- might be worth a try on your next egret outing

[Daniel Cadieux]

Neat capture by the egret. I guess the dragonfly was pushing its' luck! Depending on what was at the right of the bird, a good thing to do would have been to physically move to your left to get that rock out from behind it. Good job on the other rock removal as I cannot tell where it was.

[Art Kornienko]

Nice action capture and nice pp work. I agree with the whites looking a bit gray and need to be whiter.