Off to a walk out to the closest lake we ran into a group of swans displaying a very playful (courting?) behavior, calling each other, splashing water, looking altogether unruly.
I am not sure the shot was worth ending up sitting in the water and coming home with wet pants, shirt and shoes, the learning was though. The best shot was another Eurasian coot but I want to make a point that I do take pictures of birds other than coots.
As usual, grateful for any suggestion.
Specific Feedback Requested
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Nikon D750
Nikon 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6
f/5.6 @400mm ISO500 1/4000
Great pose and I love the flying water drops, Esme. The low angle did work very nicely. It may just be me and the lousy internet connection we’ve had lately, but I’m not getting a larger image to try to evaluate image quality. I do think the one specular highlight directly above the right swan could be removed to advantage-it’s really drawing my eye.
Dennis, many thanks for the feedback. I too cannot see the image, our internet is super-slow right now so maybe it failed to upload. I am attaching here the re-processed one - I removed the specular highlight.
Thanks @Keith_Bauer and @EMF. Esme: Now that I can see the larger image the detail in the main subject looks very good. The shadows on the birds are rather intense and you might want to play with bringing them up a bit to see if you like the effect.
A lovely shot of the splashing bird, and interesting behavior. I find the trees (?) in the top fifth of the image distracting. I think a more pano crop would work well. The other bird being so OOF is a distraction for me but it is important to the story. I don’t know that lens but I’m surprised at the artifacts of that OOF area. Maybe the wide open aperture isn’t the best at 400mm.
Diane, thank you for the pano suggestion. I will try it. I don’t know about the artifacts, but these were two in a larger group of about 10 swans splashing all over the place. I suspect that what looks like artifacts may be just stray drops from other swans coupled with the backlight. I tend to keep my lens wide open but at these longer focal lenses it’s good to experiment something a bit smaller. Thanks for the tip.
Nice shot. A good low angle and really nice pose with outstretched wings and lots of splashing. A good suggestion about the pano crop. Sometimes even closing down the lens a 1/3 of a stop can result in sharper and better images so certainly worth a try.
