Great Crested Grebe wing spread

[Mike Hitchen]

This is one of a pair that have recently nested in the local park and should be hatching in the next week. Last weekend it spent a good half hour giving us some good clear activity and I caught it as it went into full spread after preening.

Canon 1Dx2, 400 DOii + 1.4mkii
ISO 4000, f5.6 1/1250 Minor crops for composition and highlights on the wings recovered.

[Adhika Lie]

Beautiful, Mike! Very sharp and the light is very beautiful. Maybe a touch of too much sharpening? I am thinking since the reflection is not shown perfectly, maybe it's beneficial to crop more? Even if you want to include the reflection, I can see this a little tighter. What do you think? I will also try to level the image using the water ripple as a reference.

[Mike Hitchen]

Thank you Adhika

I had noticed the excessive sharpening when I first uploaded it and tweaked the image while you were posting. It look better now. I see what you mean about the cropping.

[Mike Poole]

Hi Mike,

A very nice pose with the wingspan, but it looks bright and a bit thin to me. I may have gone a little too far with the RP depending upon how the light was on the day, but I'd be thinking of something along these lines -



I also gave the BG a little more NR

Is this down at Roman Lakes? Not been for a visit this year.

Mike

[William Dickson]

Well captured Mike, always wanted this pose from a GCG. Lovely detail you got and Mikes repost makes the bird 'pop' more. The reflection adds.

Will

[Mike Hitchen]

Mike - thanks for your suggestions and repost. The original is actually a bit darker than your post and has an almost painterly feed and I maybe I took it too far in bringing it back up.
This was at Etherow at the far end of the main lake. The grebes at Roman Lakes have a clutch of 4 that are quite developed - almost as large as the adults but still have the black and white stripes (and damned vocal!)


Steve - Thank you for your comments. I got quite a few of the shakes and the wings stretched from different angles and count myself lucky it did all this in such a restricted part of the lake because they normally move away from people when they come to the bank.

[gail bisson]

Great action and nice symmetrical wing position.What a beautiful bird.
The OP definitely needs some NR in the BG and some pop.
Mike P's repost addresses all my issues.
I am OK with the reflection- could you have gotten lower?
gail

[David Salem]

Nice image with a cool looking pose. Looks like ISO 4000 was right at the edge because there is still a fair amount of noise in the image. The repost has added more dimension to the shot so I like it. Well captured in what looks like tough lighting conditions.

[Mike Hitchen]

For reference this is the original - no processing just straight to jpg within LR. As you can see Mike Poole's image retains more of the richness.
I tried to lift the background to separate the grebe but even at the time it took a lot of thinking about it and probably overcompensated.