Early morning at Venice Rookery in February of 2007. The background was gray sky, except for OOF tree foilage in the lower right corner of the image. The foilage had to go, so I opted to go high key.
Canon 1D Mark II N
Canon 500mm f/4
ISO 800
1/3200 @ f/4.5 (badly underexposed!)
Used clone stamp to remove OOF foilage which merged with bill and lower wing feathers, adjusted exposure +1.80 at raw conversion, reduced severe noise with Noiseware (freeware), centered forward-looking pupil in the eye, lightened image with shadow/highlight, cropped to 60% of original. I love digital!
Good pose, and I like the slightly open bill. I see you indicated the image was badly underexposed...I imagine you'd know what to do now in-camera if confronted with the same "high key" situation :-) I see a bit of PP marks directly above the head and back.
Nice and sharp and the eye looks great. Not a bad job on the recovery but you can see noise on the darker areas. I also see the PP marks that Dan mentioned.
You did a good job recovering, despite some loss of detail, otherwise very nice flight shot. I prefer to see the wings up but you captured that heron stare perfectly.
High Key Heron
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