This picture was taken with my D40x, 55-200mm VR lens at 200mm, handheld. The bird landed on the dam as I was photographing. It was an overcast morning, so the light is pretty bad and the shutter is slow (1/8s) and blurry.
I thought the softness gave it a surreal sort of quality that might be worth keeping. For my own rendition, I tried to enhance that a bit... making it into an impressionist style painting.
Roughly, what I did was:
- crop
- curves adjustment to fix contrast range and white-balance.
- add 3-layer Orton effect, using my RawExpose method, and masking out some of the blurred layer on the heron
- another curves adjustment, to fix the contrast after Orton-izing
- apply Photoshop's Paint Daubs filter
- duplicate Daubs layer, blend mode soft light, opacity 70%