D500, 300 mm f4 at 7.1, ISO 2500, 1/3200 sec.
Underexposed this a bit, corrected in post but there is a weird pattern in the feathers of the bird. Any suggestions?
Any other comments fair game. This was back lit near sunset and hard to work with.
Kathy, that’s a great pose. Little blues are loads of fun to work with. The water drops and stabbing action at the surface made for good timing. I’m surprised you were underexposed with ISO 2500. Since the bird is darker than the average exposure in the frame, it may have been a combination of low light at 1/3200 if you brought exposure up using shadow/highlight or some other means in PS. I believe that might account for the “chunkiness” of the feather details. Overall this is a very well composed image.
I like this quite a bit. I’m sure your meter was exposing for the bright-ish and backlit water. I don’t know how underexposed the bird was, but it looks pretty good here. I’m not sure what you mean about a weird pattern. I think I’d have to see the image larger. I can see some noise in the bird. Getting noise out of the subject while retaining detail is tough. I believe some bird photographers like the Neatimage software. I don’t have it and have experimented with Photoshop’s noise reduction on subjects. A little can go a long way, but it does work!
Nicely composed and good action. It’s always difficult to know what to do with drops in the water. The few drops on the left-hand side of the image could be removed both in reality and in reflection as I don’t feel they add too much to the image and are a little distracting. I think the plumage is a little flat and if you have TK luminosity masks you might try to increase some of the contrast on the body of the bird. Still a very pleasing image with great water texture.