I took this on a trip to Florida for non-photographic reasons that afforded me a single opportunity to visit Fort De Soto with my smaller rig. Unfortunately "Big Red" was neither in full breeding colours nor very interested in posing, but this lone egret walked into a stretch of clear water that allowed for a bird-plus-reflection vertical. I did some cleanup from sensor dust and bits of organic stuff on the water surface, ran Neat Image noise reduction (which was badly needed on the blue background), added a detail extractor layer for the body, neck and head, and finally applied the NIK white neutralizer filter at 30%.
5D mkIV
100-400 IS II zoom, 1.4x TC III, hand held at about 300mm
ACR converted/Photoshop optimized, cropped to about 80%
1/4000 @ f/9, ISO 400
I wish there were a way to get more detail out of the bird's face, but with so few pixels on it I suppose what you see is what you get.
Hey Jake. I like the basic image design here. Nice pose and the ripples in the water are cool. Many of the whites on the front of the neck and chest and legs are too hot. And the bird is not showing enough sharp details. I can see what look to be cloning marks in the area to the right of the neck and head reflection. That white neutralizer is a funny filter. I think it works well to make over exposed skies a bit more blue but not sure the color of the water looks right. I would clone out that last little reflection of the head.
Nice simple frame Jake, I'm not seeing what Isaac is being, but I'm only viewing on a standard non 4K monitor. I like the ripples in the water but do agree that the lowest part of the reflection should go.
Dealing with these really long reflections is tough. Including all of them necessarily means being too far out to see much fine detail
on the bird, and cutting them off leaves the frame feeling wonky and/or incomplete. So, it's a tough call either way. The whole iage
looks a bit pink to me, but that is an easy slider fix independent of the crop decision.
Egret and reflection
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