Another of the rare-for-July Brant

[Daniel Cadieux]

Quite an early migrant for a bird that normally passes through here in late October/early November. Although I've seen and photographed Brant geese on a few occasions this is my first photo of one actually in the water - good to have variety in the files! :). Taken on the same day as my previous post of this guy, but here the sun decided to make an appearance for a minute or two. Going any lower would have introduced an ugly man-made shoreline to the top of the frame.

Canon 40D + 100-400L @360mm, aperture priority, evaluative metering, 1/1000s., f/7.1, ISO 400, +0.7 EC, natural light, handheld, slight crop for composition.

[Dan Walker]

Pose and water look good, nice exp. Dont mind the shooting angle, esp. if it cut out the other bank. neat bird

[Randy Stout]

Daniel;

Always fun to 'capture' an unusual one. Nicely exposed, with good detail in the dark feathers.
I might add just a bit of canvas to the left, although it isn't too centered as posted, just personal taste.

Did you need to do any work to brighten the eye up? It looks good.

Cheers

Randy

[Ilija Dukovski]

I like the how you handled the blacks, also nice eye contact, water color is very nice too.
Strange thing with so early migrants, are you sure they did not summer there?

[Brian Barcelos]

Very nice Daniel, I like it as posted. You did a great job with exposing the blacks. I took some images of Canada geese the other day and it was tough to get the blacks and whites correct on the neck. I seen these guys pretty late into spring around here and mistook them for Canada geese until my son noticed, very strange. Congrats

Brian

[Ramon M. Casares]

I would crop a tad from the top and give some CCW rotation.
Nice light, detail, exppsure, colors and BG.
Congratulations!

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Dan, I like the light, and you have exposed this nicely, especially the head and neck - good detail. The more I look at this, I would maybe take away the browner areas of the shoreline above. Cheers.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Did you need to do any work to brighten the eye up? It looks good.

Cheers

Randy

Thanks Randy. Yes, I lightened the iris a bit and I also darkened the pupil as it was almost completely lost in the catchlight. I do minor eye work such as this on about 90% of my bird images:)

[Raymond Barlow]

Nice one Daniel, the angle looks good to me, and very nice processing and comp., I might have taken the top brown bg out of the image, and started from the green down.