Great Skua

...in the rain. Taken on a small island called Mousa, famous for it's relatively well preserved 2000 year old broch in which thousands of storm petrels nest in. Camped there one night in mind to photograph black guillemots outside visitor hours, unfortunately the weather was awful in the evening and in the morning the fog was so thick you could barely see.

lots of skuas of both kind on the island and with a careful approach, you can get close enough. processed this in mind to show the rain but i fear i've made the bird too dark

40D + 300mm F4L + 1.4 extender
1/320 @ F5.6
ISO 640
full frame

A very nice, evocative image Jack. I agree it may be a touch dark (could definitely be a bit lighter around the eye) but then I've never seen one of these. I love the foreground cover and the raindrop at the end of the beak just sets it off.
Robert

Depending on the exposure you could probably bring up the dark areas a bit in PP, but the image looks fine other than that, maybe a smidge more room to the right, but fine other than that.

yes it is a bit dark, how does this look?

Beautiful image, really atmospheric. The re-post looks better to me, but I'm on an uncalibrated monitor, and the first didn't look too bad really!

The drop of water on the beak and the dark, moody light in the original really sums up the weather conditions at the time.

Both look fine to me too Jack, liking the drop of water a lot