Little Blue Heron in flight

Here is another image from my recent travels, captured at Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge on April 3rd. There were lots of birds feeding in the canals, which are water managed, and I was getting some images of birds catching fish from where I was sitting on the bank. But I found that as other people walked past, the birds were always spooked very easily, and flew off into a nearby field. At first I was a little aggrivated by this, but then it occurred to me that this provided an opportunity for some flyers. So as the birds were spooked, and then after a short while began to return, I set up for flyers and tried to got a few interesting shots. As you can tell from this image, this is not a good time of the day to be shooting - light is harsh. But I did find a few images that I liked from the many attempts. A small amount of canvas was cropped off the top and right side of the image to improve composition.

This little blue heron flyer was captured with a Canon 1D Mark IIN camera and Canon 300mm f2.8L lens and 1.4x extender, manual exposure 1/2000 sec at f7.1, hand-held.

I like the pose and the colors. Strangely I see noise on the plumage but not the background at all. I wish for a little more clarity of the eye, it just seems so not visible even though it is there, perhaps it's the lacking catchlight that may be needed.

NIce image and I agree with nits.

Tim,

Nice wing position. You could run some very light noise correction on the bird but not too much as it will destroy detail. I would suggest next time out, be ready to add about 1 stop of light for the dark birds. Your manual exposure is good for wing birds but the dark bird needs more exposure. Doing so moves the digital data up on the histogram, providing more signal and thus less noise.

Looks like you might have use Shadow/Highlight on the bird which made the low tonal value noise more apparent. It was mentioned above the the BG had no noise and the bird did. The reason for that is the BG is brighter then the bird, higher on the histogram, thus more signal strength. The more data, the more noise is drowned out.

Some things that could have helped would be flash at full power to open up the shadows and illuminate the bird - 300mm + 1.4 XTC, he was probably close enough for it.

You can make a selection on the head and neck and lighten it up some. I woul not add a catch light as that would look unnatural due to the light direction.

Hi Tim,
Very nice composition and capture, all of the nits have been covered; none from me...I like it..Congrats...:D

One thing you could do with the eye is lighten the iris and darken the pupil; that can help draw attention to the eye without adding an artificial catch light.

HI Tim The bird seems to be back lit? That will alter your exposure altogether In this situation not sure any flash would be useful since you are way over the sync speed.

Agree with suggestions and would stress exposure and double checking your histogram

Thanks to all for your comments and helpful suggestions. I'll reveal some of the post processing that was done on this image and that may explain some of the flaws that have been pointed out here.

The bird was a little bit underrexposed and I understand that it was somewhat backlit. I'm aware that I should have exposed the shot a little bit more, and I should have at least tried using flash (don't remember why I didn't). Underexposing the shot was a pure accident. I could have shot Av or Tv. but I prefer Manual mode for flyers because results are more consistent than shooting in the other modes. For example, if I had used my normal Av setup for flyers against the sky (+2/3 or +1 EV) and then the bird flew low and had a background of darker foilage instead of blue sky, I would severely overexpose the shot. I was using manual simply because that way the shot exposure is not affected as much by the bird flying against the bright sky, or in front of a darker background, as is the case in this image. If you meter against the sky, often you find you need about +2/3, and if you meter against the background, you may need - 2/3 or -1. This realization usually makes it possible to shoot manual, and not mess with EC, and then you can usually get the shot no matter where the bird flies, against sky or trees. I just missed on the exposure here in spite of that.

The reason that there is some noise evident in the bird but not the background, is that I isolated the background and applied NR to it, but not to the bird, for fear of blurring the detail. I did make shadow/highlight adjustments but I applied separate amounts to the bird and to the backgroud, since I had isolated the two with a quick mask. I probably lightened the bird a little bit too much, and I think this is what made the noise more evident. Maybe I'll go back to the original and apply a small amount of NR to the bird and see if I can get away with it, without losing too much detail. I didn't even attempt to work on the eye in this image. Bottom line is that although the shot was a little bit underexposed, it wasn't bad and I liked the comp and wing postion, so I tried to make presentable. I saw some noise in the feathers on the full sized image and I had hoped that when I downsized it to 800 px, it might not be visible. Guess you guys called me out on it. Thanks for that - every day I learn a little something more than the day before...

By the way, I hope to see a lot of you folks on Saturday at the Alligator Farm rookery. I'll probably be wearing my worn out white Chi Chi Rodriguez hat. Look for me if you're there.