Flights of Fancy!

Hello everyone,
I was away on an 8-day Arabian Sea scientific expedition (into international waters) and just got back a couple of days ago. Will take a while to complete some pending work before getting back to the forums, but here's one image for a starter...

Shot this Flying Fish somewhere around a hundred-odd nautical miles from the Maharashtra coast. Flying fish use their enormously modified fins like the wings of a glider to take to the air. Some flying fish have been known to achieve non-stop flights lasting up to 45 seconds!

Canon EOS 500D, Canon 100mm Macro USM
SS 1/800
Av 3.5
ISO 800
Some noise reduction done in LightRoom.
For the record, the saturation is untouched :).
Large crop. Using a longer lens however, would have significantly reduced my field of vision.

Thanks, C&C welcome. More coming up after a while...

Wow! Almost looks like a digital painting. Lovely wing/fin spread. Wouldn't mind seeing this as the image of the Month. Thanks for sharing.

Wow amazing capture. Quite lucky to sight and photograph it with the fin spread. It does look like a painting. The vertical composition looks nice. Thanks for sharing.

Lovely. This actually looks like a painting. If you had created this image in full frame then this would have been really amazing. Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

Very nice image and great capture. Thanks for sharing such a wonderful and amazing creature. Remembering the scene of "life of pi" when suddenly these creatures started flying from one direction and hitting the boat.

Super image Abhishek. Agree looks surreal and painting like. the highlight for me is the angle from which you got this shot and subject of course.

TFS
Roopak