Little Blue Heron - 2 by Leeco

Photography • Animals • posted on Aug 22, 2012

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Description

I had a rather rare opportunity this week that I wanted to share. This young egret (at least I think it is a young egret) landed at my pond and spent several hours there. He stayed about 100 foot away but even that close is very unusual. I seldom can get with 3 or 4 times that distance before they fly away. I discovered that it is very difficult to get a good shot of a white bird on a bright sunny day without some spots of white being blown out. I took about 500 shots at different apertures, shutter speeds,ISO values,and EV compensations. I finally wound up taking drastically underexposed shots and used digital editing to get some more usable images. I also had problems with details because my longest lens is just 200mm. The fact that it is pretty big (for a bird) helped somewhat. This image was taken at about 60'. That was as close as I ever got to him before he would fly to a position further away. This shot also had a very cluttered background of tall grass that was quite distracting so I removed it all digitally and created a new background. I don't do this very often but in this instance it really needed to be done. I thought this was a heron because of the yellow legs, S-curve neck and trailing legs in flight but a friend said he thought it was a common egret and the legs would eventually turn black. I assumed it was young because it came so close and did not seem to mind me moving about. C&C welcome and all feedback is greatly appreciated. note - edited on Aug 25 to correct ID Lee

Comments (5)

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razabazarguy

3:49PM | Wed, 22 August 2012

your work is amazing, specially the focus..

MrsLubner

4:26PM | Wed, 22 August 2012

Hi, Lee! Hey, this is lovely. I know what you mean about getting close - they just don't want to play that game, do they? I can't say what this is without my N.American Birds book and its at home while I'm at work. Great job with it for sure.

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