taking off

thanks for looking.

Good action shot Jeff.

Good timing, nice cropping and a very nice framed presentation. But you can sure see the focal plane in this shot. The body is clear, the wings are OOF. Unfortunately the wings are dead center as the primary subject in the image. Might have been better to back off the zoom, exapnd the focal plane, then blow up the picture in PS. You had low enough ISO to stay noise-free, I think. Changing the AF to the wing would have made the body blurry. One of those split second decisions that come with bird photography. (Most of which I, of course, fail to do correctly.) 5/5 anon

Surely a nice capture; good focus. I actually don't mind the OOF wings at all; even the about 2 f-stops you could have gotten by raising the ISO to 1600 would likely not have been enough to get them in focus (hard to tell without knowing the actual distance); furthermore 1/500sec shutter speed might not even be enough to freeze the wing motion completely. Backing off the zoom and cropping later might have worked, but could also cost you detail on the bird itself. Placing the heron not dead center would work better IMHO; even if that means to give up some of the trailing water drops. Regards, Dieter

There were a few tough calls on this one where I would be compromising at least one of the "rules" of photography. I cropped this just enough to keep trail of water from the heron. I thought this was important to show the action even if I compromised the "don't have the subject in the centre of the photograph" rule. And I agree that the 1/500 shutter speed wouldn't have stopped the wing movement, which I actually don't mind because, again, it shows that there is some action happening here. Anyway, I "think" I can confidently say that I like it the way it is, which I don't often say. :) Thanks for the comments and suggestions. I do appreciate it very much.

Jeff