Took another trip to LaChua Trail (Gainesville,FL) in hopes of seeing the Whooping Cranes. They were there again, but were too far to photograph - again.
My wife and I usually go on short trips when we get the chance, and she's really gotten into ID'ing, but never shooting. Things changed on Sunday. After about 30 minutes of not much action, she decided she wanted to give the camera a go. She's already pretty aware of camera settings, and this time around learned about setting exposure compensation for different toned birds. She shot coots and snowys, adjusting the exposure as needed. I was amazed at how quickly she picked everything up - always looking for a clean background, nice head angle, and decent action.
After we got home I noticed that she had shot for 70% of the time, racking up over 200 images. She culled to her favorite 10, cropped and edited in LR, and I exported them for email (which is why this guy is 800 px wide). All was done with minimal help from me (which is good, I think, since I may have botched the contrast on this one!).
The result is the Coot you see above. I just hope she doesn't get too hooked ... we can't afford another long tele at the moment!
Tell your wife she did extremely well. Very good low angle, sharp, nice OOF BG, love the down the barrel stare with the red eyes. Coots are hard to get an appealing image of (at least for me), and this one is stellar. Very well done.
A Coot from my wife
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