Loon and Chick

[Roy Priest]

Another one from earlier this year
Camera: Nikon D300S
Lens: 500 mm f/4
Exposure: Auto exposure, Aperture-priority AE, 1/160 sec, f/4, ISO 400, Compensation: -1

[John Chardine]

Sweet Roy. Beautiful soft light. Super background. Great sharpness especially at 1/160s (from shore, tripod or from boat?). Great head angle on the adult and would wish for a CCW turn from the chick. Based on the water I think the image could use slight CCW rotation.

One day I must organise an opportunity to photograph this species!

[Julie Kenward]

Oh Roy! If only that baby had turned his head a bit more...I would give you five stars! There are 1-2 tiny white spots on the black adult head that I don't think are part of the pattern (water drops maybe?) - if so, I'd clone over them. I also think a bit of CCW rotation would even out the ride in the horizon of the water. What a truly splendid image - I'm hoping to get down to our nature conservatories this fall and find some loons to photograph. I hope I get one half this nice.

[Randy Stout]

Roy:

Very nice! Colors, shooting angle, backriding,foot waggle!
This chick is about as big as you will see riding, must be over two weeks old, so an extra nice capture.
Often the adults won't tolerate such a big chick for long, and will dive away.

Head angle mentioned. You might try and tease a bit more detail out of the whites on the breast.

Thanks for sharing!

Randy

Jules: By this time of year, most of the adults will have started to molt, so they aren't nearly as handsome as this one. Of a group of six adults I saw swimming together last week, only one showed no signs of molting. There may be some regional variation on this however.

[Lance Peters]

Hi Roy - doing wel - harder to get two good HA over one ;)
Like the low shooting angle - I might just desaturate the greens just a tad.
Nice one!

[Jamie Douglas]

Great contrast in colours Roy, brilliant image. I might be inclined to remove the white spot on the left of the image, it keeps distracting me.