WC - 2nd HM

WC#477 The Morning Watch

My daughter, Jenaya, has been asking me to join her in the wonderful community here at NPN for some time now, and when she told me about this week's challenge we both had the same thought: it was time I joined and submitted one of my favourite images for consideration.

This image was created WAY too early one morning back in 1994. My wife and I were out photographing near Pitt Lake in British Columbia, Canada and had arrived before dawn in hopes to find some critters at first light. Most of the critters that day ended up wearing feathers, which was fine by me. I was keeping myself busy shooting in the opposite direction when my wife said, "John, you'd better turn around!" I did so and watched a Great Blue Heron carefully stalking the water around the log he was perched on, just as the first rays of the day began to clear the ridge to the east.

The scene was so dramatic and so saturated with cool light I immediately knew what I wanted to do. I quickly spooled the Ektachrome I had been shooting and loaded a roll of Fujichrome Provia as fast as my fingers could permit. I had complained repeatedly to my wife and other nature photographers that I didn't like how miserably the my recent batch failed to record shadow temperatures accurately, shifting strongly into blue hues, and decided to use that "weakness" as a strength.

Just as I closed the back of the camera and swung the tripod head into alignment, an osprey chose this post as his perch, and the heron decided to stick around for about three frames. I chose to underexpose by 2/3 stop to saturate the blues even more intensely, and just held the shutter release until the moment had passed. The resulting image ended up becoming my best-selling limited edition print back in the 90's, and remains one of my personal favourites in large part because of the wonderful moment it captured.

Two quick notes of explanation about the image as seen here:

1. This is a horrible digital reproduction of the original. I have never had this image scanned and only dug it out of the files yesterday for a quick and dirty scan at my local amateur lab. The scan was so bad I decided to photograph my 4X5 duplicate transparency of this image, and ended up blending those files to come as close to the original as possible. Hopefully I'll get a quality drum scan done down the road and will repost this in the appropriate gallery later.

2. The colour is very close to what the original transparency recorded, without the use of filters, etc. The only post-processing enhancements made were attempts to correct the colour of the scan, but I could not match it exactly despite nearly an hour of tweaking.

Sorry for such a long-winded post! I'm happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

Nikon F90X (same as N90s in US)
AF Nikkor 80-200 f/2.8
Aperture and shutter speed not recorded
-2/3 EV on Fujichrome Provia