Great Blue Herons

[Jay Campbell]

This image was taken on March 2007 at the Venice Rookery using a Canon XTi with 100-400L at 200mm at f/5.6, 100 iso, 1/250 sec. no flash.

[Judd Patterson]

What great subjects! The wing spread is great, but the overall image appears a bit dark. I'd suggest you try increasing the exposure a bit if you shot in RAW, or salvaging the JPEG with a level/curves adjustment. Since you use a great zoom lens, you might also consider framing your photographs just a bit looser, so that the birds have a little more room around the edge. Great to have you here at BPN!

[George DeCamp]

Jayc,

Venice Rookery, man I love that place and look forward to shooting there again in February. Beautiful subject, excellent wing stretch. As Judd said a bit dark and gave good advice to try on your image. Next time perhaps try that flash if you have it to bring up the detail on that wing on the right a little more. A step or two to the left would have placed the other bird beak in the blue sky instead of the wing and given you the separation you should have for your composition. Hope you live close and can bring us more images from the Rookery!!

[Jay Campbell]

Thanks for your comments. I did capture the original image in RAW & used Photoshop Elements 6 to crop, clone, & adjust lighting. I have a whole lot to learn & plan to re-work this from the RAW using the advice received.

Here is a small jpeg of my unprocessed RAW file.

Jay