Egret in a Sea of Grasses

[Paul Ricciardi]

One of my long time favourites, a bit out of the box, but I never posted it here
Camera: Olympus E500
Lens: Pentax 500mm f/4.5 Super Takumar (manual focus)
Exposure: ISO 400, F/8, 1/3200, EV -0.3

[Juan Aragonés]

Paul the image seems to be a litle bit soft or lacking deatils in my monitor, maybe it is due to the uploading process. I like the composition a lot but I think that I wouldn´t go for a square format. I think that a landscape format, with more room at the left, would work much better on this one.

[Jasper Doest]

Hi Paul, I love the concept...but I think this would work much better if there would be way more grass in this photograph.

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Really Like the idea behind this capture and agree more grass would strengthen this image and I agree on the cropping that Juan suggested. Many thanks for sharing.

[Arthur Morris]

A good plan, but with the bird facing away and the grasses covering the bill this one does not work for me. And yes to much wider.

[Paul Ricciardi]

Thanks for the input guys, much appreciated. It's been a while since I've been around the forums and it's been months since I did any sort of wildlife photography so it's really nice to start dipping my toes back into things.

Firstly it's not a square crop, it's in a 4:3 aspect ratio which is how the Olympus DSLRs output
but I can totally see how a more rectangular crop could work...that's actually something I don't like about the Olympus system-I prefer a 3:2 ratio and the only way to get that with an Olympus is to crop. Part of why I switched to Canon (this is an old image).

I feel like I have another image around here somewhere that I took with a 300mm instead of a 500mm.
Let me see if I can find it.

You guys reminded me why I used to come here-my bird photos are close but never nail it and everytime I post a photo I walk away with things to remember for the next time I hit the field. I just entered the world of professional photography less than 6 months ago and I'm still in my sophomore year of college so I've got a lot to learn. Thanks for sharing some experience and wisdom, the folks here make the learning experience a lot more tolerable. :)

[Paul Ricciardi]

Well I have one that's similar but different...don't know if this would be any better.

The concept was similar-show an Egret in its surroundings which, in this case, are the ridiculously thick marsh grasses.