So close (Dusky Grouse)

What can you say? Sometimes you get yourself in the right place at the right time and choose a good angle on a surprisingly cooperative subject and make ALMOST all the right decisions.

Jenaya and I found this male dusky grouse proudly courting a female a couple years ago now, and he afforded me ample opportunity to get everything right. I dialed in my negative compensation both to reflect the darker scene and hold the highlights, I checked the histograms and LCD, and thought I had it...but in the end I was close but not quite. The whites escaped me and a few too many pixels slid off the end of the dynamic range of my D7000 at this ISO. Hey--he was drumming pretty good at the time so I can always say I simply got some nice motion blur (in fact, there's a legitimate chance that's part of my problem here).

I processed a few images anyway but never posted them at the time, still feeling the pain of coming so close but not quite hitting it. However, Josiah and I have been thoroughly enjoying photographing grouse this summer and while I try and get a few of the resulting images processed, I thought I'd share this one, even if it's not quite perfect.

As an aside, I gotta tell you that photographing any wildlife subject in open evening shade on the east-facing side of the Rockies can absolutely shock you on what you have to do to retain highlight detail. There are many times we've had to underexpose the image by a stop or more to keep the upward-facing light muzzles of bighorn sheep from blowing out, or the white chests of a fox family. I shoulda known better.

Thanks in advance for any comments or suggestions...maybe I'll have another go at a few images from this experience sometime down the road and see if I can milk a little more detail out of the whites.

Nikon D7000
Nikkor AF-S 200-400mm f/4 IF-ED VR @ 380mm
ISO 640
1/250sec @ f/5
-1 EV
monopod
almost completely full frame (just cropped a bit off the top and bottom for better balance)