Green Heron photographed at the Village Creek Drying Beds, Fort Worth, TX. A rich environment for an old sewage sludge treatment facility! The City of Fort Worth is happy to welcome birders to the site!
40D
700mm
f/5.6
1/800s
ISO 200
Flash Fill at -1 stop
cropped to 65% of FF
Very nice little fellow. Sharp on the eye, well exposed, good head angle.
A bit more DOF would have been nice. There is a dust bunny in front of the birds left knee.
I might consider burning in the perch on the left where it projects forward. It is bright enough to call attention away from the bird. Although often not possible, if you could have moved to your right, so the perch was more parallel to the image plane, that might have made for a more pleasing picture, assuming the bird cooperated! I might also consider cropping off the extreme left end of the perch, or cloning out the large knob projecting up.
The extra DOF would have helped with the perch a bit too.
Keep them coming!
Randy
Last edited by Randy Stout; 07-13-2009 at 07:34 PM.
Randy's comments here did the job,
I just wanted to mention I like the color tones here.
Very unusual and looks more like film than digital.
Especially the water is very interesting...
Like the HA and the intensity in the eye, it tells a story. Other comments cover it well. The large perch coming out to the left draws away from the bird. But not sure how to deal with it other than cloning.
Hi Daniel. I really like your heron! The eye is great! In the repost here, I took the liberty of removing the big projection on the branch using a quick mask. This left a few marks that I didn't like, so I opened the image in the liquify filter (CS3) and pulled the area to the left. I also removed the dust bunnys with the patch tool and selected the bright areas of the branch and toned them down. I think that these changes direct the viewers eye to the bird where they belong. Thanks for sharing and keep them coming!
Thank you for all the great suggestions. I had the light just where I wanted it and was trying for a shallow DOF, but should have upped the f/stop to 8 or 9 to keep the perch in focus. Chalk it up to excitement of the moment. Experience and good critique, as always, are the best instructors.
Green Heron
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