Great Blue Herons K3iii/55-300PLM

[joelbolden]

A Great Blue Heron pair feeding on Black Moshannon Lake. For some reason I lose my exif data when I re-size, but all the pics were shot at f10 except the last when I increased to f32. Shot in AF-S with 1.3x crop engaged.

 

[weepete]

What was your shutter speed like?

1. Good action, but a bit overprocessed as it looks a bit too contrasty needs straigtened, and doesn't appear to have focused on the heron.

2. Best of the set, looks sharp and natural. If anything it's a little bit flat due to the even lighting though there's really not much you can do about that and all in all it's a solid shot.

3. I like the water droplets, but looks like the focus is on the bushes slightly in front of the bird, but it could be a bit of movement blur if your shutter speed wasn't high enough

4. This one is an amost for me, if the bird in flight wasn't clipped it would have made a pretty fine shot. This one I can't really tell where the focus was meant to be, it looks to be in between the birds but there's nothing really sharp in the entire frame so it would suggest to me that your shutter speed was a bit slow on this one. Slightly off level as well.

5. Opening up the aperture to f32 is a bit of an error, as diffraction has kicked in and made the scene mushy, it would have been better to keep to keep the aperture below f16 and get the foreground bird nice and sharp, letting the one further out stay oof. Compositionally you could crop this to a 1x1 and loose a lot of the left hand side that doesn't add value. This would also make the sight lines of the birds and make a nice triangle of where the interest is.