Big Meal

Excellent catch! The details on the bird and the fish are very nice.

Ray

great moment, sweet angle, head could be little bit sharper , but anyway good job, thank you for sharing!

John,
This Great Blue bit off more than he could chew. Great first post and nice detail right down the the leaf infront of his eye.
From one new comer to another, welcome, these are a great bunch of folks to be associated with.

Very nice 1st post John, you've captured some fabulous action here and handled it nicely. A couple of thoughts that might help - if you would have gone with a higher ISO, say 400, and a smaller aperture, with your lens even down to 5.6, you would have had a much higher shutter speed and less depth of field. This should have solved the slight softness in the eye and would have softened the water in the background and put even more focus on this beautiful bird. Again, nice first post and welcome aboard.

A nice first image.

I would help to know a bit more:
- do you shoot in raw or jpeg
- how much of a crop (if any) as posted
- what software you use (Photoshop, PS Elements, Lightroom, Aperture, something else?)

I also enjoy knowing where an image is taken (at least the state).

I agree the head has lost a bit of sharpness and apparently from subject movement. A faster shutter speed would have helped. The D300s has excellent quality at ISO 400 and I use my D300 at ISO 800 in many situations. As long as exposure and focus are nailed noise isn't really an issue.

WOW, all great replies. Thanks, I'll try to respond to all in this thread. I am not really satisfied with the lens, it being an economy Nikon zoom. I'm currently trying to decide which good glass would be best to mortgage the house on. As far as the ISO/aperture goes I was under the understanding that the sweet spot for a lens was 2 f-stops above the max. I was aiming far the sharpest image and not concerned with DOF.
Richard, I do shoot raw and process through LR3, I'm fairly new with the program. It was cropped, is there a easy way to find the amount of cropping? I shot this heron close to where I live in eastern Nebraska.
These are all really great questions and think I've found a tremendous resource to help me develop my new found passion.

Go to the Digital Tips index on my web site and click on the "Calculating Crop Percentages" heading for the method I use.

Yes, most lenses give their best sharpness one or two stops down from wide open, but I think most of us select the aperture based on the subject/background we're working with.

That's an incredible first post. Great exposure, very sharp, and really good composition. To crop it any tighter would cause a loss of the ripples emanating from the bird. Super job & welcome to NPN.

Great action and a nice job capturing it, John. The nits have been addressed. I would note that I like the dof you have here-I think the texture of the bg water adds to the image. However, the shutter speed could have been increased through a higher iso without much difficulty as noted by others. Welcome aboard.

Great details & image, love the action John. As Rich has stated, a bit more info when you post might help.
The biggest single thing you might've done differently was to have shot this faster.
Hard to stop the movement sharply at 1/500th.
And again, Welcome!

Love the image, the color of the bird, the water and the size of the fish. Think it is a winner.