White Pelican

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Sony A850~Sony70-400G@300mm~ISO 400~1/2000sec~F9~manual exposure~HH~10-26-2010~Texas City Dike~CS5
The pelican was stepping off the piling here. Although I like much prefer the ease of exposure of soft light, and the lack of shadow problems, sometimes clouds do not co-operate. That's what happened this day. Did shoot fairly late in the day though.Comments and critique welcomed. Regards~Bill

my website (http://avianimagesource.com)

[Dave Leroy]

I really like the moment you have captured. Perfect timing. It looks like fun.

Nothing blown out and nice details in whites and some in blacks. As you have mentioned direct light gives shadows.

Fill flash maybe??

I also like the nice look at the head.

Dave

[Ben_Sadd]

Nice details and a great pose captured. I would have liked the zoom to have been pulled back just a touch so we could see a little bit more of where it is stepping.

[Joel Eade]

William,

I like this alot .. nice moment captured ... good detail and exposure, white balance is good.

If it were mine, I might try to lighten the dark underside of the right wing a little just to see if a little detail could be coaxed out and I might try to evict the very last piling that is oof.

Nicely done,

Joel

[Julie Kenward]

All good suggestions here, William, and a very nice image to begin with. My one additional comment would be that his head intersects the horizon and it's best to generally try to avoid that. Waiting a split second longer might have dropped him down a bit and put him entirely in the darker blue of the water. Still, for the lighting, you did an excellent job on exposure control.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Thank you Dave, Ben, Joel, Julie. Very good suggestions. I rarely photograph in high contrast light, and I was thinking that I might have just become too lazy to deal with it. Here at BPN I do occasional see photographers dealing quite successfully with this type of light (high contrast) and getting good images. This requires a quite a bit more skill than shooting in soft light where exposure is so much easier. So does this mean that I'll purposely go out when there are no clouds? No, but if I get stuck in the situation, perhaps I should stick around a bit longer than I usually do before heading to the house. Actually this image turned out better than I expected, and I think the usual very dark shadows/bright highlights might have been helped by light reflected up from the waters surface, as well as the sun being closer to the horizon. regards~Bill

[nancy hazen]

Very nice! I love seeing the feet caught in mid-step. You did a great job with the whites.
Nancy