Reddish Egret Up Close And Personal

[ThomasChadwick]

Reddish Egret (Fort Desoto: North Beach)
Cloudy Day
Taken on November 24, 2013
12:12 P.M.
1d mark IV, 500mm f4L is v1, GT3542LS + Wimberley Gimbal
Manual
1/1600 f5.6 iso 640
Standard Lightroom Adjustments

[Don Railton]

Hello Thomas

Looks like the hair dryer just blew up and she is not happy.. Love that look..! Nice and sharp although you had room for more DOF and that would have helped with the tip of the beak.. I shoot the same rig as you and 1600 ISO is easily useable along with a lower shutter speed... I would have tilted the camera up also included all the head feathers at the very least, maybe even a few steps backward to give the bird a bit more space.. finally if it were mine I would darken ever so slightly the sheen on the brown neck feathers.

DON

[vishaljadhav]

Impressive details , i agree with Don on the darkening of the sheen
i would compose it pointed above to include the full hair do , it attracts more interest for me in the image.
if you were so close to the bird a bigger F would not help as the DOF is very shallow at the near MFD images.
Over all nicely executed, i like the look in those eyes

[ThomasChadwick]

Thanks for the suggestions. I edited the picture to make the sheen darker.

[Daniel Cadieux]

He he, looks like this fella is in no mood to be photographed! Exposure and details look good (I can only see the repost) but yes to pointing your lens up to include the full coif. I suspect you wanted to include all the reddish neck feathers but IMO the hair at top was more important to include so sacrificing the neck feathers would have been my choice (assuming this is a full-frame image).