The sunset depicted here and in my previous Egret at Sunset* came at the end of a long day; I'd spent the previous night on the overnight train from Shanghai to Nanchang. After hours of unchanging, bright afternoon light, at sundown time is suddenly compressed; the pressure's on to wake up and do well. This shot was taken just four minutes before my first Egret at Sunset, but as you can see, the situation is much different. In the four minutes between the shots, the sun, still peeking above the treetops here, had already melted into the branches. What's more, this is an intermediate egret, not a great white egret, and the bird is flying away from the sun, not toward it. I chose this pano crop so as to give the egret something to fly into; I want you to have the sensation of depth, with the sun in the far BG, the bird in the midground, and the orange to the right in the "foreground." I want you to feel the egret moving toward you.
Device: Nikon D3S
Lens: VR 600mm F/4G
Focal Length: 600mm
Aperture: F/4
Shutter Speed: 1/8000
Exposure Mode: Aperture Priority
Exposure Comp.: none
ISO Sensitivity: ISO 200
Subject Distance: about 63 m
Photoshoppery: Using content-aware fill, I cleaned out the bare branch that the bird in my first Egret at Sunset is about to land on. In this shot, that bare branch is just clutter. I made sure that my bird was totally black by copying the image, pasting it as a new layer, then brightening the layer radically so that all the non-blacked-out parts showed up. I then painted black all the non-blacked-out parts, applying the changes to the original layer.
* http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...set?highlight=







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