Portrait of Grey Heron

This is one of the favourite spots of aquatic birds post fishing. The fallen tree provides platform to hunt for tiny birds and resting place for larger ones. They dry under the evening Sun post the busy meal pickings. This pond nearby the monsoon stream is also favourite spot of common kingfisher to target its prey. The common kingfisher perches on the tiny offshoot from the trunk where it aims for its meal. Today also, I saw beautiful glimpses of cormorants, kingfisher and herons perched at same spot. The Grey herons though are quite shy and fly away even with slight human presence. Fortunately, this guy stood for a while before recognizing my move. This picture was just before the bird flew away seeing me. The bird squints initially for possible move from humans before flying away. Even a tad closer to the bird would prompt it to fly away. I was happy to shoot it close and final image had to be minimally cropped. I love the way it stood majestically on the dead branch with green backdrop shone by soft morning sunlight. The details are too good for the gears I possess. The final image after edit turned out to be the way I wanted it to see. Here is a portrait of Grey Heron from the natural studio owned by mother nature :-). Hope you like the image.

Some details of image

Meter : Spot metering

ISO : Auto (Max capped to 800)

Av Mode : f/5.6

Shutter speed : Auto

EV : 0EV

Photo Editor : Darktable

Editing : Level correction, haze removal, RGB correction, and normal Contrast/brightness/Saturation corrections, noise corrections (profiled)

I like how the image turned out to be well detailed with f/5.6 despite the larger body of heron. This is magic of sunlight which enables camera to choose high shutter speeds and thus rendering sharper image.

Check out my Bird Series blogs here : NKBirdSeries