Cattle Egret in flight

Visited an Egret breeding area this past weekend and was practicing my white exposure techniques. It was not until mid morning until the egrets started with their frenetic activity and with a bright sun it was quite hard to get the exposure correct.

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3718/9...8103bc65_b.jpg

Nikon D7000
300f4 + 1.7x TC @ 500mm (should be 510 but exif says 500)
f 7.1
1/2500
ISO 500
Evaluative metering - 1 1/3 stops (Kept adding shutter speed until the blinkies disappeared)
Handheld with continous AF using rear button and 9 centre points

Levels adjustment with some Gaussian blur on background and cloned a darker area in the background right infront of the bird.
Brightened the underwing a tad
Removed a slight blue cast that the wings had. Not sure why that happened.
Cleaned the beak a bit
Darkened pupil slightly
USM 143% 0.3 after resizing

Comments and critiques more than welcome

nice pose, good BG. head is sharp. main issue here is the harsh light, the whites on the far wing have no detail

TFS

Thanks for the comments Arash,

No part of the wing was overexposed in the original, so do you think I should be able to recover the details, or would the harsh light make that a difficult proposition?

If possible, how would you suggest I go about that using CS5?

Thanks for the help?

I am not sure since it shows no detail as is ...maybe try to bring down the highlights during RAW conversion and see what happnes.

Thanks, will try that later and see if anything pops out

Super pose on this one but agree on the exposure.

Thanks Marina,

Had not time to reprocess this but will try again tonight

With these birds i was increasing shutter speed to the point at which no blinkies were appearing. Should i add one extra click after that? I was worried about then having to lighten the shadow areas and getting grain.

An on a pretty steep learning curve for BIF ;) Hopefully will get there in the end