Blue Heron

[ryder]

Taken with a Nikon Coolpix L100 at f/5.4, 1/67s, ISO 400, focal length 75.0mm (35mm equivalent: 414mm). PP involved cropping, adjust brightness/contrast, and adjusted saturation.

Any ideas for improvement welcome.

[ecate78]

Hello!

Nice catch! To improve you could try to make the background less important, I think you could try the render/lens blur command of photoshop to put the focus only on the heron.

[ecate78]

And if you are familiar with the healing/patch tool you could try to eliminate the herbs in front of the heron.

[windrider86]

Do you have anything specific you are wanting help with? Also, if you have your exif information please post for us. Knowing your camera settings can and will play a huge part in offering you suggestions!

[ryder]

The settings are in the post. I guess putting them inline is not a good idea.

Mostly wondering if the PP was too much saturation, but it seemed to bring out the blues/grays of the bird more than the cattails.

Also wondering about the crop. Is it too close or should I maybe have added some to one side or the other. I definitely wanted the feet in the mud and some room at the top for matting.

I kept the original, so I can rework the crop if needed.

Actually, he seems to be living here so I could reshoot if needed. In fact I will be trying to catch him in flight soon, so I will be sitting in a blind for a while here.

[craigmstevens]

My issue is it seems a little out of focus. I think the vibrancy could be raised to give it a little more color. It is kind of drab. These are very timid birds and hard to photograph from my experience.

[ryder]

Boy is that the truth. I had a devil of a time getting close enough to get this capture. I tried several times over many days, but finally got two shots of him in the reeds. Not perfect but the best I could do. I am using a Nikon Coolpix L100 Point and Shoot camera and he did not give me much time to compose these before flying to the other side of the lake. I just shot wide and then cropped out the center to get the composition. And I was at near maximum zoom on a monopod to get the wide shots.