Reflection

[Kartikeya Puri]

Would have loved to get him without the clutter in the water near the breast but this guy was not planning to move too fast and I was hard pressed for the gate closing times in Ranthambhore.

Canon 20D + 100-400L

400mm @ f/6.3, 1/1000sec

All C&C are welcome.

Regards,
Kartik

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Kartikeya,
Nice first post. I like the composition. If the head of the grey heron were turned a little bit towards you, then the eye contact would have been better. It would have been better if you could have used a higher aperture say about f9. You had enough shutter speed to play around. The clutter in the water doesn't bother me much, as that is how it is naturally.

Are you not shooting in RAW?

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Bibhav Behera]

Hi Kartikeya,
Nice first post. agree with Sabyasachi that you could have played around a bit more with the aperture... Good shot nevertheless...
Thanks for Sharing. Keep Posting...

[Mrudul Godbole]

Hi,

Lovely first post. I liked the composition. The details on the feathers are nice. Agree with Sabyasachi about a bit more head turn in your direction. The reflections in water are interesting.

Look forward to see more of your photographs. Keep posting..

[Kartikeya Puri]

Are you not shooting in RAW?

Sabyasachi,

I was using mixed file types. In this case I was shooting JPEG as we were at the end of the safari and my cards were almost full. This situation made me realize that I need to get a few 8gb cards for future use.

Head turn would have been great but getting a good head angle would have been a chance.

The reason I did not go with high aperture was that the bird was parallel to the focal plane and I wanted the BG to be dark/OOF. Would a smaller aperture make a difference in this situation as well?

I agree with you about clutter being there naturally, to me it gives a little idea of the birds hunting grounds.

Regards,
Kartik

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Kartikeya,

The bird was parallel to the image plane, but the head and beak was not. So it needs some more dof to get it completely in focus.

I see that you have used the manual exposure mode. If you would have increased the aperture to f8 from f6.3, with the shutter speed remaining at 1/1000, it would have got less light and would have become darker. If you check your histogram, it is more towards the left, though not touching the left side. If it touches the left, then the blacks would lose the details. If you have time in the field, keep an eye on the histogram.

While uploading your image, please use the image attachment button and paste the url in the second box and then click on upload. Else, the thumbnail wont show. That's what I did, as the thumbnail was not showing.

At any cost use RAW. Even if that means curtailing on your burst mode. These days cards have got a lot cheaper. I remember buying a 1 GB card from singapore at about 13k rupees. My recent card a 16GB cost me 110 USD. So better to have a few cards and always try to download your cards before getting into the forest.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Kartikeya Puri]

I see that now Sabyasachi. Next time I will try and get greater DOF. And you point about RAW ... I gotta get me some of those CF cards soon.

Cheers,
Kartik

[Sagar Patil]

Nice shot and framing, Kartikeya.

Its a nice illusion. Difficult to figure out which is original, upper or lower?

Funny thing is, the modification which you needed to do on the neck part (which is little bit overexposed) is itself solved by reflection in the water

If you don't mind I have flipped that image vertically and posted here.

[Kartikeya Puri]

Sagar,

I did not even think about flipping it vertically, you did it nicely. It sure is an interesting idea, I got to try it. :-)

Cheers,
Kartik

[AB Apana]

Hello,

Agree that it's a great first post. Perhaps the highlights need to be recovered a bit and a bit more sharpening added.

Apana

[Rahul Parekh]

beautiful capture