A female Great Egret incubating her clutch of blue eggs. The back light really shows off her breeding plumage. It was these plumes that were used to adorn women's hats a hundred years ago and nearly led to this bird's extinction.
Lots of great comments. Thanks everybody!
Some people mentioned that they thought the image was dark or the background was dark. It is really hard to get a white bird at the right exposure without overexposing. If the background was exposed any brighter then much of the detail that you see in the bird would be lost. Additionally, if the BG were brighter wouldn't the bird be less of the main focal point by the brighter distractions behind her? I did burn down a lot of the highlights in the foliage and the branches.
Here is the original. cropped and resized only. I did what I could. There are folks here with terrific PS skills that would have done a better job. I am happy with my result.
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this is an excellent picture...so very under appreciated!!! We have these birds here but they are all UP in the trees so without a lift I don't have a hope of getting this angle...love this...
Excellent shot of this nesting egret Scott. Now you need to come back down here to Florida and get some more of these. She looks like a white peacock in this one.
Wow! I would love to have a shot like this in my portfolio. You also did an amazing job pping it given the pure white of the bird and the dark surroundings. This has to be one of my all time fav egret shot.
I think this is very lovely....I live in Florida and we get trees that are "full" of these birds if you can imagine it...it's really funny to see all their feathers all "fluffed" up and them doing their little dances...I think this was well done...
What a gorgeous presentation - and I don't think the background too dark at all. You're right about exposing white birds, and I think you did a very good job of it here. Her pose is so shy and demure, yet it implies a quiet proudness - as you mentioned in your title, she's very elegant. Beautiful shot!
I like this a lot in its centered composition. Lovely setting, I think it's extremely hard to get a shot this nice of pure white birds. Very well done....7
I think the mating season is going on down here right now...I need to find out as they are quite interesting to capture when they are in the mating ritual...for me this is just a touch dark in the exposure...you've lost some vital detail IMO (I'm talking more about the leaves rather than the feathers...those are super detailed...good job)
Delicately nestled in her nest with her feathers fanned out to catch the light of the sun, she rested. This beautiful white bird really pops visually off of the dark background and that immediately draws my eyes attention to your main subject. While a good photo I think that there is some room to improve it and kick it up a notch or two into the high above average category. The first thing I would recommend is to always wait for the eye or eyes to be very visible in the shot. Whenever the audience can make direct eye contact it greatly increasing visual interest. Second is that the focus on the body of the bird looks soft and is not as sharp. There are things you can do after the shot is taken to improve the detail - unsharp mask, clarify, playing with the brightness/contrast levels or any combination of these three to various degrees. Now it could also be that the original is razor sharp but resizing the photo down in one stop and then sharpening it looses a lot of detail. I learned this tip early on at DPC - with large original sizes, resizing and sharpening the photo down in two or three steps (i.e. 4800x3000 to 2400x1500 sharpen and then resize again down to 960x600 and sharpen) will help preserve the same sharpness and detail that the original shows at full size.
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