Young Green Heron

Nice light; good composition. There's not a lot of detail, though. did you crop a lot and/or apply noise reduction to this?

Very nice David, like Richard said, good light and good composition. It seems a bit soft to me though.

Nice light and detail, David, and I like the composition. My only nit is that the one patch of bright lichen behind the back is a bit distracting-particularly in the larger version.

David,

I like the hunkered down posture, head angle and those fine wispy feathers on the head. Colors look good but there is a touch of softness and lack of detail. Was this handheld?

I especially like the pose and colors here David. Your comp works well for me also. I too wonder about crop size and whether or not you hand held.

David, I love the comp and the greens in the bird. To me the lack of detail in the image, including the bird, is very much what I have experienced when I used NR on the whole image. NR really takes the deal out of feathers and makes them look kind of like plastic. Would be interested to know how you processed this image because it really has potential.

I took this photo hand held while on a moving boat. It was only cropped slightly for composition. I think the softness could be that the photo was taken with the lens wide open and the body of the bird may be slightly out of focus because it is closer to me than the birds head. Or it could be my 1.4x convertor is giving me sharpness issues. I had a batch of Sandwich Tern photos tonight that I had to get rid of. I wish I had the $$$ for a super telephoto.

I reduced the NR, got rid of the bright lichen and I darkened the herons body slightly to give it more detail.

Forgot to add the photo.

Excellent image David.
May