Red Breasted Merganser

I took this shot early this morning, they were pretty spooked of me so I stood still behind my lens for over an 1/2 hour motionless until they became comfortable with me being there and started moving in close to me (What a treat for me). I then waited for about another 15 min until the sun slipped past the cloud.
C&C wanted and welcomed

Thanks Rodney

http://rebphotography.smugmug.com/ph...89_LT868-L.jpg

Nikon D300, 200-400mm @ 400mm, Gitzo G1340 Tripod, Wimberley Head II, ISO-320, f/5, 1/800 sec, matrix metering, cropped a bit in PS3

Rodney:

Welcome to BPN! A lovely bird to work on. Nice to see his crest up. I like the color in the upper background, plays well with his color. Sharp.

A couple of points you might want to consider.

The whites are overexposed, always a risk with birds like this with blacks and whites (loons, etc.) It might be possible to recover with highlight recovery.

The head angle is just a bit away. We try to get it turned towards us a few degrees if possible.

The composition is a bit centered, and the images often look better if the bird is offset to the right ( when swimming to the left) with more room to swim into. It is also pretty much centered top to bottom.

For me, the bottom doesn't add as much to the image, and I would recommend cropping up from the bottom.

I wasn't certain whether you took this when the cloud was covering the sun or not, but it looks like full sun. If that is the case, you would have been better served re: exposure range, to take it when clouds over sun.

Much easier to handle the dynamic range of a cloudy scene, rather than full sun. Easy to handle little tweaks in post to make it pop.

Please keep them coming. It is a good first post, but we all have room to improve! (esp. me!)

Randy

Welcome to BPN, Rodney! Very nice first post. I like the details, eye contact and water colors. I would crop some off the bottom and try to recover the whites. Did you dial in negative exposure compensation? A slight head turn toward you would have made it even better. Keep them coming!

big welcome to bpn! the head angle would have made a big difference. nice job on the patience. looks like you brought them in close!!

Thanks Randy,Axel and Harold

Thanks for the warm welcome and all the great advice, I've taken your advise and tried another photo.
I wasn't sure how much room around the duck to give it

http://rebphotography.smugmug.com/ph...78_YKRBw-L.jpg

Rodney:

I find the crop on this one better, and the exposure is def. better, re: no blown whites. Probably taken when the clouds were in. I might consider making this a panoramic crop (aka pano crop). You can come down about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way from the top, keep it same on bottom and to right. The water here isn't as interesting as the color at the top of the previous image, so thats why I think a pano crop would work. Plus, it will make the bird larger in the frame, relatively, which is usually good.


It looks sharp. Might be interesting to see if a curves adjustment could bring up a bit more detail in the blacks.

Much better head angle, by the way!

Cheers

Randy

Great first image Rodney. Love the originally posted bird. Guys are right about the difficulty of exposing correctly and it does seem you clipped those whites. I would suggest a crop from top and bottom as there is just a little too much negative space, but that is a subjective matter. The head angle police (HAP) are already onto ya too. :) Thanks for posting and let's keep it up shall we? :)