Little Egret

[Glenn Pure]

Another shot from my trip to the Okavango Delta last May. We happened to be passing in a boat when this egret succeeded with a catch. I don't have much experience with high key images so would welcome any pointers. This is about half the frame area. I've cloned out a few water drops

Thank you for looking and for any comments you are kind enough to share.

Technical: Canon 80D with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/1600 sec, f7.1, ISO 800. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 3, crop, lighting adjustments, NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Modest NR to bird and stronger NR to background. Bird only sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian Blur) after final size reduction.

[Alex Becker]

Nice one Glenn, Love the prey item, the tiny falling water drops, and the intent look on the bird. I wonder if bringing the shadows down on the bird could help highlight the rim lighting here and make it slightly more dramatic. TFS

[Bill Dix]

Great catch! I like the high-key background. I had the opposite reaction about the shadows: I wonder if you could lighten the shaded areas on the bird and tone down the highlit areas.

[Debapratim Saha]

To me the bird is well exposed,only the bg highlights could be toned down,nice composition and a dynamic image.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Glenn, I like the curvature of the neck of the Egret, and his catch sure aint going to fill him up, but at least you got the shot. I feel the light wasn't on your side, and I am wondering if creating a full high key BG may achieve a better result.

[Daniel Cadieux]

I like the sharpness, curvature of the fish, and composition. Neat that there is a bit of translucence on the bill, but I must admit that I wish the light was coming from behind you.

[Glenn Pure]

Thanks for taking the time to comment Alex, Bill, Debrapratim, Stu and Daniel. As mentioned, I was unsure how to handle this one and will put it down to experience.

I like the sharpness, curvature of the fish, and composition. Neat that there is a bit of translucence on the bill, but I must admit that I wish the light was coming from behind you.

Take your point Daniel on light direction but this wouldn't have been a high key image if I'd had the light behind me as the background would have been much darker to compensate for the strong light on the bird. I also wouldn't have had the rim light which is part of the reason I tried to work this up as a high-key. But not entirely successful, I think.