Egyptian Goose Chick

[Stu Bowie]

Taken at the grounds of the University of Pretoria. So innocent at this age, but what noisy geese when fully grown. Cleaned up the water a tad.

Canon 50D
100-400 @ 400mm
1/3200
F/5.6
ISO 500

Exp Comp +0.33
Hand Held

[Brian Barcelos]

Love the comp and reflection/ripples. Sharpness spot on and good exposure. Kind of hard for me to say this but imagine me saying it with a real deep voice- Aw how adorable:D Congrats

[Michel Pilon]

Hello Stuart,

What a cute chick! You managed perfectly the exposition and you got a great POV including the nice reflection. It seems to me that the picture lean a little bit toward the right by 1 or 2 degree.

Great pic and thanks for sharing!

Michel

Michel Pilon (Photographe-Naturaliste)
Quebec, Canada

[David Fletcher]

Tell me its not Friday Stu, cos this is so cute!!! :D. Nicely done.

[Morkel Erasmus]

super sharp in great light Stu!! it does need a slight rotation to get the water line in front of the chick level. are there a lot of chicks around now at LC?

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Beautiful capture of this little one Stuart. It is a first for me . Love the comp. with the lovely reflection and excellent detail. Well done.

[Mital Patel]

fantastic details and eye catching image this is. i just wished for a vert compo. rest you've done very well.

[Stu Bowie]

Thank you all for the kind words.

Im in disagreement regarding the rotation guys. Regardless of the water, the tips of the beaks line up, so it must be correct. Tell me Im missing something.

[Morkel Erasmus]

Stu I agree the beaktips are aligned but for me the waterline here is a much stronger indicator of level because hte subject and reflection aren't that large. In images where you have an egret for example standing straight up in the water, the length of the reflection is a stronger indicator than the water, and often there's no water line to judge from. Don't know if I make sense?

[denise ippolito]

Stuart, Super cute and fluffy. Very nice exposure and sharpness and the reflection is a bonus.

[Phil Ertel]

Very cute. Good sharpness and exposure. When I used the ruler tool and drew a line from eye to eye and then went to image/image rotation/arbitrary it showed 0% rotation. So the bird is indeed level. Must be the waves that gives the allusion of needing leveling.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Cute little guy, I also like the sharpness, reflection and composition. I might tone down the highlights a bit.

[Harshad Barve]

Stuart , one sweet image this is
TFS

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

Rotate or not, I love the cuteness Bro! Incredibly nice image and good work on the H2o. :)

[Kiran Poonacha]

Beautiful Bhai, lovd the light, pose, reflection and crop.. congrats...

[Dave Barnes]

10/10 on the cute scale. Good colour and detail.
Comp wise I would have preferred a bit off the top and a bit added below.
I also know that you will not be able to get lower at LC but that would also have been an improvement.:D

[Michel Pilon]

Hello Stuart,

Aligning the eyes shows that you are right. So I agree with you: the image is correctly aligned.

But, as the illusion is still there my eyes continue to see it not perfectly horizontal. So I'm questionning myself, should we cheat and apply a slight rotation to counter the illusion or should we stay with a perfectly aligned image but with an illusion that let it appear a little bit unaligned... It is similar than when we put a tapestry band on a wall near the ceiling, we often cheat because the wall is not perfectly horizontal in order to let the band appear correcly aligned to our eyes...

Cheers,

Michel

[Stu Bowie]

Thank you all for the great feedback and comments. Interesting to hear regarding the alignment issue.