Great Egret

[WIlliam Maroldo]

SonyA700~Sony70-400G@400mm~ISO1000~F11~1/1250 sec~manual exposure~Hand Held~4-3-2010~High Island, Texas~CS4 Comments and critique welcomed. regards~Bill

website (in progress)

[Bob Decker]

Good looking bird. a lot of detail in the wings and on the top of the head. It looks like the highlights might be blown a tad in a couple of places, but it doesn't really bother me that much. I might expand the canvas a bit more to the right to give the bird a bit more space to move in to. I like the diagnol leading line created by the bird's legs/feet drawing the eye up from the lower LH corner.

Good show.

[Lance Peters]

Hi William - like the pose with the nesting material on the concentration on it.
Head area appears a little soft - some additional sharpening might help.
Looking good.

[Dave Mills]

Hi Bill, Above comments echo my thoughts. I like the position the subject is in with a HA a bit different than what I'm used to seeing. With warmer light the image would have been superb!

[Alfred Forns]

Agree with comments and would like to see the wings stretched out !!

Bill this year I have been experimenting using a higher shutter speed for my flight images and seems to work. If you see some of the beauties posted by Chris van Rooyen he always likes to be at 1/2500 or over. I have not been able to stay in that range (for all) but have been keeping in mind. Might be something to consider.

[arash_hazeghi]

like the nesting material, good job capturing in flight.
Wing position is so so, and the bird is soft, BTW this is a text book example toasted whites as I was discussing in the other thread, highlight details are lost beyond recovery. As far as the tech, I would def go to f/8 or f/5.6 for more SS.

TFS, looking forward to the next one.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Appreciate the feedback. I should have sharpened the image after resizing for web. Alfred, I've been upping the shutter speeds for a few months, as a matter of fact since you brought the concept up a few months ago. It does help, but it also means I've needed to shoot ISO 1000-1600.
Arash; I still have a problem with your theory, but I really appreciate your discussion. I would say the light from above caused the problems, and I should have burned some detail in, for it is there, I checked. Of course with the RAW image, and not the reduced sized JPEG, The highlight detail is not beyond recovery. Furthermore I can not detect any blown pixels in the JPEG (or RAW), not red, or any other channel. How are you checking them, and are you seeing something I'm not? I use CS4, curves, and then check each channel for clipping, after examining the histogram. Am I missing something? regards~Bill