Grebe with a Catch

[Joerg Rockenberger]

Photographed today at Shoreline Lake in Mountain View, CA. Thanks for looking! JR

Canon 40D, 400F5.6, 1/2000s, F6.3, ISO-400, EC +1/3

[John Cooper]

Wow, thats some mouth-full John!! A nice sharp image with good BG and the big catch provides lots of impact. Well captured.

[Gautam Biswas]

An amazing image. Yes, quite a mouthful. The beak is not clear, seems broken. I would suggest to crop some part off from teh left edge of the frame. AS of now the whole image only occupies only the right half of the frame and the left is almost blank.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

That is one ambitious little grebe. :) I like the action, light and eye contact and would do some CW rotation.

[Robert O'Toole]

Awesome. Very good work and the fact that you made it with a little 400/5.6 and not a 600/4 with a 2X makes it even more impressive to me.

The crop and comp is perfect the way it is. A square crop would ruin the image and make the bird look confined in a box. the bird looking into open space creates anticiplation and is part of the story.

Thanks for sharing.

Robert

[Jean-Luc Vaillant]

Very nice capture, especially with a "short" lens. I would do a little CW rotation and place the bird a bit lower in the frame though.

[Joerg Rockenberger]

Thank you all for the kind feedback. Yes, this was asking for one of the big guns as this is a heavy crop. So, further cropping was not really an option as all sorts of ugliness appears. Besides, I like the crop as is. JR