Taken on quite a foggy morning at Estero lagoon in Feb. It slowly came in from quite a ways back and I just followed it in my viewfinder and "bumped" the autofocus periodically until it was close enough to where I wanted. Man, the push-pull zoom design is great for this type of situation. As I knew it was going to stop and land just in front of us I did not press the shutter button until it put on the "mid-air" brakes. This is the first of a 3 frame burst (the other two being OOF). I'm undecided about the "habitat" top of the frame, but the image looks quite sterile with it not there.
Canon 40D + 100-400L @200mm, manual exposure, evaluative metering, 1/320s., f/7.1, ISO 640, +2 EC (metered off water and histogram checked), handheld, very slight trim bottom and right for composition.
Nicely captured. I remember that morning. I wonder if you could bring up just enough detail and a hint of the color in the water, to eliminate the sense that the habitat in the URC is just floating in mid air!
Here is a quick pass at what I meant. It all depends on your vision for the picture, but for me, the changes help establish the environment, give it a bit more sense of location.
Your title sounds like a fish story to me, Daniel. :) I like the pose you captured and I'm a big fan of the repost. I have mixed feelings about the habitat in the URC. On the one hand, it gives the image a sense of place, but on the other side, it draws my eye away from the bird.
Randy, nice repost. I may just rework this image...but I think somewhere between the two would work best. My version resembles more of what I remember the conditions being that morning - but your explanation of your repost makes sense. Thanks!
I often have to think about an image, is my recollection of it adding a context to it, that might not be apparent or obvious to another person just seeing the image in isolation. In this case, I just thought, that the added information from the repost helped me place the image better in my mind. It added some context that helped me get it.