Great Egret

[Bruce Gove]

pulled over on the shoulder to watch this Egret and try to figure out where I'd want to approach this guy when I had more time. my gear was in the back seat and the light was going away fast.. first thing i know here he comes right towards me. I eased over into the passenger sead, got the BLUBB in place and got my 300 f/4 on my camera with the 1.4 TC. He came to within about 15 yards of me!

30D, 300 f/4 IS X 1.4, (420mm) f/5.6 1/100 ISO 400 EV0

Comments and critiques welcome

Bruce Gove

[Robert Amoruso]

Hi Bruce,

The exposure looks good. You did a good job getting him in the clear (grass, etc.) for a nice habitat image. IF you intent was to crop the legs you did so mid-way between joints which is the right idea. However, I think here including the legs would make for a stronger image. You could have taken off the TC or gone vertical. I also notice what looks like noise but with the 30D and ISO 400 I would not think it would be such bad noise. So I am thinking one of two things happened. THis was underexposed (which does not seem to be the case given the techs) and you increased the brightness in curves and levels - that will accentuate noise, or it is a JPG and has seen multiple saves. If JPG, consider trying out RAW as you will have better control over the final image quality.

[Bruce Gove]

Hi Robert, not sure why this came of of PS this way - it was a raw file that I worked on and converted in light room then opened in PS to sharpen and size for the web. could it be that i sharpened too much? did 3 times @ 125, .3 and 0 using smart sharpen. It looked much better before! I've got a another image that I cropped to isolate the head, did extensive bg cleaning in PS and sharpened the same was, and it looks great even though I screwed up when I resized it so it's only about 43K. I'll post that tomorrow. thanks for your comments Robert!

Cheers,

Bruce Gove

[Robert Amoruso]

Hi Bruce,

That's kind of weird as neither the exposure or JPG issues may have caused this since you processed in RAW. Sharpening probably is the culperit. Go to http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?p=49212#post49212 and look through this thread. Especially Artie's post small-JPG routine and a few posts done for additional comments. This should help.

[Bruce Gove]

Many thanks Robert.

Bruce