Great Egret

[Steve Deam]

I captured this image in the Lower Suwannee NWR a few days ago.

Canon 7D, EF600mm
1/400 @F5.6 -1EV
ISO 400

PP in LR4 with a light touch of Color Efex 4. As you can probably tell, it is heavily cropped - it's maybe 20% of the original frame. (Should have used a TC, but didn't have one with me.) Other than needing to get more pixels on the bird, I wondered what C&C some of you might have.

[Doug West]

I'm wondering what a move to the left would've done. The reason is, I
don't like the tree intersecting the bill. Moving left (if even possible)
would've placed the whole tree as the background.

Doug

[John Chardine]

Hi Steve- I generally like it when the subject is "in-hiding" like yours. Love the veg and colour. Maybe a looser crop would work? On my calibrated monitor the whites in the feathers look really bright. I checked with Color Meter and there do not appear to be any hot pixels but many of them are the same or similar very high level, which produces no detail. Perhaps the whites could be toned down in ACR with the Exposure or Recovery sliders.

[Rachel Hollander]

Steve - good suggestions above though I'm not sure that the lack of detail on the bird may not also be due to the heavy crop.

TFS,
Rachel

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Steve, good points made above. From your settings of 1/400@f/5.6 and the lack of detail in the whites I would say that this capture was very over-exposed and I'm guessing that you brought the exposure down in LR4. Did you also try the highlights slider, taking it to the left? There is a blue cast to the image, which is very evident in the whites. What time of day did you make this capture, and was it full sun?

[Steve Deam]

Thank you all for the comments. Like everyone I am here to learn and I really appreciate how helpful everyone is.

Re: the blown whites, in my limited experience I would have to agree with Rachel, that it is mostly due to the heavy crop. Since the bird was stationary, I took care to try to get the exposure of the bird just right. In AV mode, EV-1 pushed the whites as far right as possible without blinkies and without clipping the histogram. Is that the right approach?

Kerry, the shot was captured around 3:30pm in direct (hard) light.

I agree with Doug and John on the cropping. This pond has a viewing deck, but otherwise it is gater infested marsh so that ruled out moving left.

Thanks again for the critique! It is very helpful.