Yellow-Crowned Night-Heron

I spent the first two weeks of February in Baja California, Mexico during which time we made a four day trip down the peninsular to go whale watching at the Laguna San Ignacio. As well as the Gray Whales we saw birds galore. I took 3,600 pics during the trip and saw 91 species of bird, of which 61 were new to me!
This picture of was taken from a boat as we drifted along a channel in the mangroves on the far side of the whale lagoon.
(More pics to come in the future)

Canon EOS 40D
100-400 lens hand held at 360mm
F5.6
1/1600 sec
ISO 200
Full frame with no alteration

I like this shot a lot, the bird stands out nicely from the background and looks sharp and well-exposed. My major nit, however, is that the bird is too central in the frame, which has resulted in the head looking out of the picture. As this is full frame you obviously have no spare canvas that you have cropped for the upload, but it should not be too difficult to add a bit more space on the right and clone in some extra sky and a few more leaves to improve it compositionally.

David

Sounds like a great trip. The composition issue raised by David can also be addressed by cropping; I can't see any real improvement coming from adding to the amount of sky and leaves in the image. On my sscreen, the bird looks rather soft. This may be because "no alterations" means that you haven't applied any sharpening; all digital images need sharpening to overcome the effects of the anti-alaising filter over the sensor. Out of interest, did you record this image as a RAW file or a jpeg, and what colour space have you selected in camera?

Thanks for your comments. As for your question Phil, I shot it in RAW and the colour space in camera is sRGB.

As for your question Phil, I shot it in RAW and the colour space in camera is sRGB

I wondered if that was the case as the colours in your image look a little flat. Unless you have storage problems, you might want to consider setting the the colour space to Adobe RGB so that you can take advantage of the increased dynamic range. Although you would be reconverting to sRGB for the web, it still seems to have some benefit, though probably only if you do some work on the colours in Photoshop.

Thanks for that Phil. I used to shoot with the 'Landscape' picture style and then changed to 'Neutral' after reading article by Arthur Morris. The colours seem a bit weak and obviously need adjusting in Photoshop. I am waiting for a copy of Photoshop Elements 8 which I have just purchased. I had the use of Photoshop 7 on an old PC but only used that to resize images and auto levels if it was an improvement. I am a Photoshop virgin so to speak! I have never liked the idea of too much digital manipulation of images but looking at all the top images around I think I have a lot to learn. I have been dissapointed with the lack of sharpness of my images since I got my EOS 40D just over a year ago and started shooting in RAW. I use Canon's Digital Photo Professional to download my images and organise them and also use it to carry out limited alterations. I also have Picassa 3 which has some useful tools but I don't like using it as it has a few glitches! I have several books and DVD's on digital processing but find it somewhat confusing. I could do with some one on one tuition.

Hi Andy,

Not to get too confusing but you are doing nothing wrong... the colour space set on the camera makes not one iota of difference to the RAW file, you can set the colour space on conversion, the RAW data will occupy exactly the same amount of space... You will find a huge difference once you have installed Elements, as a rule I try to do nearly all the adjustments on conversion, that way you preserve pixels... do it in PS and you are eventually throwing those pixels away...

I am going to be away for just over a week but should have some internet access so if you want to ask any questions then please do.

Nice image by the way that would benifit from that added space for the Heron to look into.

Many thanks for that Phil, I will see how I get on once I get to grips with Elements.

Nice image but agree with comments above re composition, processing etc. If I were you I would have a word with Andy A re camera settings and processing.

Thanks Maggie