Cattle Egret

[Pralay Lahiry]

Posting after quite sometime.
Shot in Central Park, Calcutta in October 2011.
Camera D90 ; Lens Sigma 150-500
Exif: f/6.3 ; Shutter 1/3200 ; ISO 320 : EV -1 ; Spot metering ; Tripod support

[Mrudul Godbole]

The perch and eye contact is nice. The image looks a bit dark to me, increasing the brightness would be good. What is the small image of the bird on the left? Thanks for sharing.

[Pralay Lahiry]

Thanks for the critic Mrudul. That small bird is my watermark.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Hi Pralay,
The shutter speed of 1/3200 is not required for a slow moving bird like an egret. Unless two egrets are fighting and you want to freeze action.. I am wondering why the -1 EC? The -1 Exposure compensation has underexposed the image and made it dark. You can see the noise as well.

The small size images uploaded in the web are often downloaded and will continue to be downloaded. However, these small images don't serve any commercial purpose. At best someone can download your images for school assignments. In a country where most of the newspapers and magazines don't pay you for your images, I am sure we can ignore the web downloads of these small files.

There are also professional watermarking softwares available. If you use those then you can track if anyone has downloaded and used that image.

Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Pralay Lahiry]

Thanks Mr. Patra for the critic. I had used the high shutter speed deliberately to darken the image and highlight the soft light on the periphery of the plumage. Was experimenting with the light effects. I have the same bird with slower shutter speed where the whole image is properly illuminated but there the light on the plumage periphery is lost since the whole image becomes prominent.

I had used watermarking because I have seen some instances of plagiarism on the net. Though photoshop can do wonders it might be little more difficult to remove this or so I am told by the computer whiz kids.