Chestnut Teal

[Glenn Pure]

Taken in early morning winter light at Lake Curalo, Eden, New South Wales. We have a bush block in the hills behind Eden and I try to get in at least one 'dawn raid' on the lake when we visit. The light was wonderful that morning (a week or so back). Nothing special here but it's hard to resist the beauty of those wavy ripples reflecting the glowing light. I hope there are more entries for the monthly theme as I don't recall seeing many to date. This is almost full frame.

As always, 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 USM Mk II at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/100 sec, f7.1, ISO 1600. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 2.5, crop, lighting adjustments, reduced luminance NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Some USM to the bird to sharpen its outline. Modest global NR. Bird only sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool, remove Gaussian Blur, 0.4 pixels at 50%) after final size reduction.

[John Mack]

Gorgeous light you caught in the water. The placement of the bird is perfect. Well done.

[Noel Heustis]

Hi Glenn - I agree with you...the light is beautiful coming off the ripples in the water. If it were mine, I may have been tempted to darken the the bird just a bit more to get rid of the white, but I think it works fine the way it is. Thanks for sharing the New South Wales dawn.