Grey heron

[Arun Haridasan]

Grey heron about to fly....
1/1250
F5.6
ISO 800
500mm
D810

[John Whaley]

Beautiful light and a great pose. The reflection helps. A pleasing image.

[Bill Dix]

A beautiful take-off pose, well lit, nicely composed. Sharpening halo on the rocks.

[Mike Hitchen]

This is a very dynamic pose with great lighting and the background compliments it greatly. There are sharpening haloes around the rocks the heron is standing on but that is a small point.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Very pleasing image,I agree with previous comments. Was this a cropped image, if so I would suggest reducing the crop, I think more detail would be forthcoming in the heron.

[Isaac Grant]

I agree that you have a fun pose here and the heron is in an interesting setting with the rocks in the water. However this shot does not work for me for many reasons.

As others have stated you have sharpening halos on the rocks. Looks like you have applied sharpening to the whole image as opposed to only the bird. There is no way that F5.6 would give you enough depth of field to have the foreground and background in focus. So you want to keep the attention on the bird. You want to have the bird sharp but not the rest of the image. It will draw your attention more to the bird. You should select only the bird for sharpening and this will help you avoid that problem.

The shot is over saturated. When shooting in direct light you will often have reds and blues and oranges that are over saturated. I would guess that you added additional saturation to your shot when you probably should have reduced the saturation instead. This is evident in the blues of the water and especially in the orange of the legs and beak. Check your histogram and see where the channels are.

As Jonathan mentioned your shot is lacking in fine feather details. Perhaps from too big of a crop? Perhaps from motion blur? Perhaps from too slow of a shutter speed?

You also do not have enough details in the dark areas of your bird which is indicative of a shot that is over saturated, not properly exposed and too contrasty. It has made the darks too dark and the light area on the top of the head too hot and without any fine feather details.

Not sure what the black line is on the bottom of the beak and the white spot are. Perhaps some cloning artifact?

This shot has lots of potential. I would go back to the RAW and see if you could re process it. If the shot was not tack sharp then no matter how much it is processed it will not be a keeper. Just an excuse to get out and try again. Sometimes it is very hard to let go of a shot that is so close but it is something we all need to learn to do. Often times I will go out and take hundreds of shots but only keep one or 2 at most. The rest were either not tack sharp, not exposed properly, don't have an ideal pose or any combination of the above. I have come home more times than I care to admit with zero keepers .

Looking forward to more.

[arash_hazeghi]

Issac covered all the points, nothing left for me to say

[Arun Haridasan]

Thanks for the comments .....appreciate your points Isaac....it was cropped too much....