Black-Necked Stilt

Gallery: AvianPosted June 10, 2012113 views6 comments

June 8, 2012 at Bolsa Chica Wildlife Preserve, Huntington Beach, CA
We arrived before sun up with hopes we would have good sun and resultant low light reflection off the water on Skimmers and Terns. Alas, "June Gloom" reigned supreme and the sun was behind the clouds while we were there. Just before leaving this Black-Necked Stilt landed in the Pickle-weed near the wooden footbridge and posed for a long while. Unfortunately we got 30 shots of 3 poses. If only he could tap dance or yodel.

D300 Nikkor 200-400mm f/8 1/500 ISO800 Aperture priority +.67 White Balance Auto slight crop CS6 Tripod with Wimberley gimbal

Comments welcome

Comments

6 comments

Comment posted by Barbara Graham on June 10, 2012 at 7:05 PM

Patrick, I think this is beautiful. I love the setting and the composition, and the black and white really stands out.

Registered on July 27, 2010, 1310 Posts, 5035 Comments

Comment posted by SandyRichardsBrown on June 10, 2012 at 9:48 PM

Despite all the vegetation, you managed to get a clear shot - excellent!
Nice pose and great habitat colours.
Seems a little bright overall , and the feather detail is lacking, as if you might have tried NR on the whole image (which kind of melts the feathers togather)
Still a very Nice image!
Sandy

Registered on November 24, 2003, 3937 Posts, 12909 Comments

Comment posted by Keith Bauer on June 10, 2012 at 10:12 PM

Hi Patrick: Looks like you have a nice image here. I like the pose and vegetation. It tells a nice story. Looking at your EXIF info, I wondered why you chose +.67 EV. I would have been concerned about losing detail in the whites. This scene should have been very close at 0 ev. Overall the image presented looks too bright on my calibrated system. I took a look at the larger version, put a curves adjustment layer on it and pulled the curve down from the middle to bring the overall brightness down. I thought it looked better.

Registered on November 20, 2003, 458 Posts, 4836 Comments

Comment posted by Patrick O'Healy on June 11, 2012 at 11:07 AM

Thank you Sandy, Barbara and Keith for your comments. I am chastened. While my setup for the shot is indefensible, perhaps the context will be helpful to understand. The light that morning was so scant that when shooting Terns in the air and above the water, the camera would not focus in Manual. There was not enough difference in color for the camera to distinguish. Consequently, I switched to Aperture Priority. I found that over exposing water and sky shots .67 was workable. When the Stilt landed, I got so excited to actually take a shot I might keep that I started shooting without considering the changes in camera settings. As a result, the shot was taken with a fairly lame set of settings.