Went to a local pond yesterday morning. Hung out for about 2 hours watching ducks and geese and cormorants. The cormorants were fishing, but mostly coming up empty, but this one came up with a nice fish. Immediately another cormorant began to chase and this one made a quick exit flying with the fish. Fortunately flying parallel to me. The action lasted all of about 13 seconds (I looked at the sequence after I got home). While I was there I thought the bird dropped the fish, but it turns out it swallowed it whole while trying to evade the other cormorant.
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Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Olympus EM1-X
300mm f/4 with 1.4x TC
1/2500, f/6.3, ISO 500
about 90% of full frame
keithcbauer
1 Like
Excellent action photo with really nice color in the water. Superb detail. And of course the fish in a perfect in mouth position. You even managed to get a good reflection. Black plumage is perfectly saturated. This image tells a really good story. The composition works. But my question to you is: how do you crop an image like this where you have a nice splash in the back and space in the front. Does it need more space in front making the image more of a panorama? I’ve also seen some photographers crop right in front of the bird so there’s almost no space for it to fly into . That changes the story and emphasis. And it is an unusual crop. I’d be really curious to hear other people’s feelings about this. Thanks for posting an interesting image.
@David_Schoen - I agree that cropping this kind of image is something to think through. I cropped from the top as there was more there than I wanted. I cropped a tiny bit from the left to the edge of the splash, and a small amount from the right as it just felt like it was too much space. That left about 1/3 of the frame in front of the fish.
