Dancing on water

Canon EOS 20D, Canon EF 600mm f/4 L IS USM, 1/1000 f/4, iso 800, tripod. Torrile, Italy.

This morning I was photographing at Torrile with my friend Carlo. It seemed to be an unlucky day in every respect: when I came out from my home it was raining and there was fog; as if it wasn't enough, when I arrived at Parma I discovered that I've forgot the teleconverters at home...

But I didn't gave up and overall the morning was much better than what I expected from the unlucky beginning. There weren't many birds, but this White Heron came quite close and I managed to take some good photos. I used the continuous shooting (5FPS) - it helps a lot to capture different poses: here, the photo freezes the bird in the istant when it touches the water.

The light was pretty low so I used ISO 800 and of course I photographed at f/4. As usual, I selected Av mode (Aperture Priority), evaluative meter and AI Servo AF. I choose to try AFPS (Automatic Focus Point Selection), even though I'm not a fan of this AF mode. Sometimes it works pretty well - when the subject is easily recognizable, for example a bird agaist a distant background or the sky, AFPS gives good results. When the subject is close to the background, or when the subject is surrounded by leaves or other objects, instead, AFPS gives extremely bad results...I've lost many photos because AFPS focussed on the background or in other areas of the frame, so usually I prefer to use manual selection and center AF point. In this photo, the background was quite distant and the subject was easily recognizable, so AFPS gave perfect results.

With Photoshop, I cropped a little the photo and I increased a lot the contrast (with the Levels Tool). Usually I am not a fan of black backgrounds, but I make an exception for white birds - in that case, the dark background complements well the subject. I removed the noise from background with the Noise Reduction (that I applied selectively with the layer mask; if I applied the NR on the entire photo I'd have lost detail in the subject). Other than that, I dodged a little the area around the legs, to improve the visibility of the dark legs against the dark background.

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