I got surprised and lucky with this image as the heron perched close to me (away from its' preferred perch) but knew right away of my presence. This has been the tamest Green Heron in Ottawa, but this time it was not very comfortable with me. The lighting was pretty ugly from this angle, with the subject being about 3/4 backlit in near mid-day light. I took two frames...the first one was pretty bad and deserved to go straight to the trash bin, the second was this one, which turned out "OK" on the LCD with LOTS of flash and positive exposure compensation...but I still wanted to raise the ISO and stop down the aperture more to get the turtle a little sharper. The heron flew away as I was changing the camera settings.
The original raw file looks "bad" too on this one with the duckweed almost blown out, and the "steel-eye" caused by the flash quite obvious so those were fixed in post. Contrast and saturation used more heavily than usual to get rid of the washed-out flash look. Some ugly vegetation above the heron's head eliminated, as well as a floating stick in front of the bill. Minor duckweed surface clean-up. Phew!! That's more than I usually do for post-processing!!
Canon 7D + 100-400L @400mm. aperure priority, evaluative metering, 1/160s., f/6.3, ISO 400, +3 EC, 580 EX II flash @ +3 FEC, handhled, just about FF (slight crop left, right, and top)








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