Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
I don’t know what made me think of this image, but a few days ago, I remembered that I had some in my files of this bird taken quite awhile ago and decided to look for them. I finally found them in April of 2013. A fellow NPN member at the time had posted a Bittern shot from Ridgefield NWR and I asked him for specifics on where he found it. It was my first trip to the refuge and the darn thing was right where he told me. Unfortunately, it came out of the reeds and stood right beside my car so all my shots were pointing down at it. However, at that time, there was a colony of Yellow-headed Blackbirds (since disappeared) quite some distance back from the tour route, and this one was kind enough to fly up to quite near the road and pose for quite some time.
After that experience, I’ve been going back several times a year.
Specific Feedback
This is a bit of a composite image. The eye came from an adjacent frame as the nictitating membrane was deployed in the image I started from (not the one I posted back in 2013). I also had clipped the bottom of the image just slightly below the bottom of the cattail head and I wanted more stem. I tried content aware crop, but it didn’t have enough stem to work with, so I stole it from an image of a Red-winged Blackbird taken a bit later that same trip. I scaled and rotated it until it fit, then blended it in.
I’d be interesting in knowing if any of my manipulations are obvious.
Technical Details
Canon 7D, EF 500 F4 + 1.4 TC, beanbag on car window, f/8, 1/1000, iso 400, aperture priority, pattern metering. See above for manipulation details. Otherwise, processed with today’s LR + PS CC. Some canvas added to bottom, cropped from the top and a thin slice of canvas added on the left. Final size was 3534x4920. EXIF data says this was taken at 7:23 AM on April 24th, 2013.