Black Crowned Night Heron

[Karen Forderer]

Here is a photo of a Black Crowned Night Heron. It was taken in the evening. I ended up using some fill flash because the earlier photos were quite dark even with very high ISO. This created some steel eye so I fixed the eye. I also adjusted the levels and did some noise reduction and sharpening. The water really was that weird yellow and blue.

Thanks for looking,
Karen

D300s
80-400mm 5.6 at 360mm
ISO 800
Flash
Handheld

[Nancy Phillips]

I love the contrast between the heron's bright red iris and the odd yellow and blue water colors. Also, the pose is characteristic, and the bird is very sharp. The odd water colors really make this shot different from the generic heron shot.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

I think it is a very nice pose, but I'm not sure about the square crop, I think going horizontal would have been better. Use of a flash has caused problems; it causes water surfaces to look very glassy, and this in itself can look very un-natural. Use of fill flash is to "fill in" shadows, and not to supply overall illumination. Use of a flash to illuminate the subject tends to make the subject look flat, and usually is not a good idea IMO.
You didn't include you shutter-speed, and this is important. If I was forced to hand-hold, I wouldn't have hesitated in cranking the ISO up, with my camera up to ISO 3200, as long as I exposed to the right (if you don't know what ETL is, google it). If your lens is image stabilized you should have been able to drop to 1/125sec I'd guess. With a stationary subject, as I'm sure this bcnh was, a tripod would have been very handy, and quite a low shutter-speed (and lower ISO as a consequence)
would have been called for. regards~Bill

[Karen Forderer]

Thanks for the critique. My shutter speed was 1/250 at f8.0. A tripod definitely would have been handy. He flew past while we were having a picnic and I just grabbed my camera and followed him. I did take some photos without flash and the water was the same colour. I didn't know if I could post the difference between them on this thread or not.

Karen

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Karen, you did a good job of thinking through the lighting situation but I think the main issue is that it looks like you were trying to match the sunlight, which appears to be coming from the right, with the flash and that means the flash had to be very strong. I'm not concerned with the squarish crop and in fact I would be tempted to take a bit from the bottom. There is still a fair amount of noise in the bg so I would take another pass at that. Does it need a bit of CW rotation? You did a good job of cleaning up the steel eye - looks good to me. Given the flat angle of the subject, I would have opted for higher shutter speed and shot this one at f/5.6 - especially given the shutter speed that you ended up with, which is too low for hand-holding IMO.

For the sake of comparison and discussion, you can post one of the other images to this thread. Thanks for sharing!