Sandhill Crane Silhouette

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

Hi All,

My first day at Bosque Del Apache. I reached the planned trip yesterday evening. I did not go out at pre-dawn as I wanted to scout the location.

I brought the site guide from Artie, I wanted to experience the location and understand the site guide better and it really helped.

Finally I stayed at the location specified in the Site Guide for Silhouette and was rewarded with this one..

Nikon D500 + 500mm f/4 + 1.4x TC
ISO 1250, f/5.6, 1/1250 sec

Post Processing
Increased exposure, Noise reduction and Cleaning foreground


Do let me know your comments and critiques

[stuart wanuck]

yes nice bet its pretty cold there

[Isaac Grant]

Sweet light and silhouette. Bird has a very nice pose as well. I wish there was a bit more room above and below the bird. Also feel the image could use a little counter clockwise rotation. Not sure about the bottom of the image. Looks like it was windy and you have lots of ripples on the water above the bird. I'm guessing your clean up smoothed out the bottom too much. Something about the strong contrast above and below the bird seems off to me. You can see all of the ripples in the reflection of the bird but it is lacking in the rest of the smoothed out area.

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

Thank you for the feedback Isaac..

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

Yes it is really cold. This was taken yesterday evening and it even colder today.

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

Sweet light and silhouette. Bird has a very nice pose as well. I wish there was a bit more room above and below the bird. Also feel the image could use a little counter clockwise rotation. Not sure about the bottom of the image. Looks like it was windy and you have lots of ripples on the water above the bird. I'm guessing your clean up smoothed out the bottom too much. Something about the strong contrast above and below the bird seems off to me. You can see all of the ripples in the reflection of the bird but it is lacking in the rest of the smoothed out area.

I am posting un processed image. There were not much ripples in the fore ground which was why I wanted to clean it up. Thank you for the comments.

I will try to reprocess the image again once I am back from the trip.