GBH at Venice Rookery

[Bob Pelkey]

Date/Time	20-Jan-2010 09:21:05
Make	Canon
Model	Canon EOS-1D Mark III
Flash Used	No
Focal Length	840 mm
Exposure Time	1/1000 sec
Aperture	f/11
ISO Equivalent	800
Exposure Bias	+1/3
White Balance
Metering Mode	matrix (5)
JPEG Quality
Exposure Program	shutter priority (2)
Focus Distance

The female Great Blue Heron allowed the male to mount her after his third arrival at the nest presenting his largest stick for nest building since sunrise.

Tripod, cropped, lightened, sharpened, male's crown muted.

[Arthur Morris]

Interesting behavior. This one desperately needed to be a vertical....

[Stephen Stephen]

Bob I love the behavioural action and the head on view but I agree with Artie. A vertical presentation would greatly improve this image.

[Dan Busby]

Very interesting and good action shot. Love the eyes on the lower bird. Vertical framing or taking that converter off would have been perfect.

[Mark Adkins]

Great focus and behavior. Another vote for vertical. The berries make a very colorful highlight.

Mark

[Martin Wallis]

Agree on vertical comments, good to get close, but whole body of male in frame would make this shot. keep em coming

[Gaye Johnson]

Bob, yes, vertical would do it for me also.....good job catching this action.....and now looking forward to seeing your other pictures from the Venice Rookery.

[Bob Pelkey]

Thanks for the constructive feedback. In hindsight, I regret not spinning the camera to create a portrait shot under the circumstances as I had done on one other occasion observing the behavior of a pair of Anhinga that were really interesting to watch in their nesting behavior. The mating behaviour happened too fast to react effectively. The reason for presenting the cropped shot landscape here originally is because that's the way I have my images presented at pbase and blogspot unless I'm using the square crop which I like a lot as well. I do not like uploading portrait images to the internet because of a concern for user unfriendliness. If you have to scroll the shot to see it in its entirety, I don't like it. And if you're viewing a portrait shot where you don't have to scroll, it's too small an image to see enough detail to appreciate the shot. In the re-crop of the image here, I'm violating my rules. The image as presented in this post has much more of the male viewable, but the entire wing spread would make the detail of the eyes of the female virtually insignificant. I've lightened the shadow under the left wing of the female in this version more than the first. I regret not capturing the feet of the female. In the full frame shot, there is a very slight clipping of the male's wings at the top of the frame. I didn't expect to be so close to the action.