Great Blue Heron with fish
I’m posting this mostly because I think its a neat shot There are plenty of Great Blue Herons at the Water Ranch in Gilbert, AZ, where I try to spend a couple hours 2-3 times per week. But I’ve never seen one here (or anywhere else, for that matter) with such a large fish. When I noticed the GBH out on the pond I just rotated the camera to vertical and started taking photos.
Shooting verticals isn’t my best skill, and I usually end up with a crooked image. That was true here, but I was only off about 1.5 degrees so when I straightened the image in Photoshop I didn’t lose much from the necessary crop that followed.
I was lucky with the light, but still had to discard some frames because the heron had turned its head out of the light, but it this shot I’ve got good light on the face and eye, and even the fish is aligned well for it. I’d have liked to be farther down the path so I could shoot more directly from the side instead of partly from behind, but there was no clear view there anyway.
The only lesson I can pull out of this is to keep alert and be prepared so you can start shooting immediately if you come across something unusual. You don’t want to waste time messing around trying to figure out an exposure, or the amount of compensation your meter might need, or if a better ISO setting would improve the image.
