Wood Stork

Good looking Wood Stork. I like how the ripples lead the eye to and through the WS and its reflection, I think you could probably find more detail in the whites by adjusting the highlight and shadow sliders (if you are using Photoshop).

I like the pose you captured.  As the shadow is rather indistinct, I could see this with a 4x6 crop removing most of the shadow and placing the eye at the upper 1/3rd corner.

Always a fun subject.

I like the pose and reflection. But I think there's too much empty water in the frame, especially the upper right and the entire right side of the composition. If you have enough pixels you could crop tighter. Thaqt would help with the detial in the feathers and on the head as well.

The soft light made the exposure easy and allowed capturing the complete tonal range from white to black, but it also is responsible for the lack of definition in the feathers. You need some directional light to make the feathers stand out from the small shadows they cast on adjacent feathers. You might try increasing the local contrast a little, but it is easy to overdo and that makes things look unnatural.

Wood Stork is listed as Common at this park in August and September,nd Uncommon in October. This might be the northern limit of their breeding range, or not far beyond it.

Nice job on the whites, Shirley.  I like the wavy reflection as well.  I think you have more room on the top than needed and with this pose, I'd be tempted to go with a more centered composition, but that's just my taste.  Nice work.

I can certainly appreciate why you cropped this as you did with respect to the stork and its reflection.   Achieving proper balance one cropping an image like this is not always a simple matter.  I do like the diagonal pattern of the water. The image does need to be seen large in order to appreciate the detail and the head turn.

Really nice image.  Lots of suggestions for crops.  I can see why you chose this one.  Unless you're going to frame it, it doesn't need to be cropped to any particular dimensions, so you might try taking maybe half off the top above the Wood Stork and a little bit off the right.  That would just be to see how you liked it.

Hi Shirley,

Large view is awesome and the image only requires some slight tuning up for perfection.  Go with the 4 by 6 crop as this guy needs to be big in the frame.  Play around with the whites to pull up as much detail as possible.  Well done with this guy--the wood stork has a lot of character........................Jim