Snowy egret

[Cheryl Slechta]

This was taken at an Artie Morris workshop at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery.
I used a slight S&H adjustment, slight linear burn, Topaz Denoise, USM and cropped.
I could have left the log the snowy launched from and have room on all sides if the crop doesn't look good. I don't have much experience with this kind of image so any suggestions would be appreciated. Maybe the IQ isn't good enough to invest any more time in:e3
Canon 7D, 70-200 f/4L IS 1.4X, 1/2000, f/8, ISO 400, manual, handheld.

Thanks for looking. Comments and suggestions always appreciated.

[Richard Stern]

Hi Cheryl,

I love the whites and other color on the bird, and the dark bg in the top half of the picture, as well as the wing position. I think that with the crop you have done, some more context would be nice, so I would prefer the log left in, and perhaps the water beneath and around the bird lightened a bit.

Richard

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Cheryl, your biggest challenge here was to keep the whites in check and you did a great job of that! I think you could get more detail if the bird were larger in the frame, so I'm going to suggest a crop from the top and left. There is a lot of busy tree parts in the upper area that could be done without, I think, and taking a little from the left would help keep the aspect ration reasonable. I think the image quality could be improved with just a little more sharpening. One thing that catches my eye is that the upper parts of the legs are in shadow and appear to be disconnected from the rest of the bird. You could fix that with some really good cloning. Did you know that you can rotate the clone source? You can copy a part of the lower leg, rotate it to match the part that is missing, and paste it in. Gotta love Photoshop...

[James Boland]

I am a sucker for white birds with dark background. The darker background helps mask the distracting limbs, etc. the manual mode set up for light colored birds is the key. I think leaving in the lod would help the image.