Spoonbill - breeding plumage

[Nitin Tawde]

I snapped this one in Ranganthittu-Mysore in month of Feb.2009. The wonderful yellow and red colours on chin were simply beautiful. It was for the first time I had noticed Spoonbill in such lovely breeding plumage.

Camera used : Nikon D70 S
Lens : Sigma 70 - 500

[Bibhav Behera]

Hi Nitin... The image gives a good feel of the environment... Spoonbills are wonderful birds.
In this image the white highlights are blown. So you need to take care of that while clicking and processing. The sharpness can be increased too. Did you upload an image greater than 200kb? In that case the site does auto resizing and the quality falls...

Keep posting. Looking fwd to more images from you.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Nitin,
There was some issue in the uploading of your image. Don't know why. I downloaded and again uploaded it.

It is not easy to click images of birds with all these branches. Your image has good depth of field so the foreground as well as the branches in the background are in focus. Else the branches in the background would have appeared distracting.

It appears that you had clicked when the light was already harsh. It is a common problem in Ranganathittu. The boat ride starts late. Around 8 am is ok, but after that it becomes tough interms of lighting.

The white portion in the back and neck have become overexposed and lost details. If you check the histogram, you will find that your histogram touches the right side frame. If it touches the right frame then the details in the white are lost. It is better to be careful during photographing. If you find the histogram touching the right side then you can give a negative exposure compensation -EC.

You can also recover the highlights by using the highlight slider (I use that in lightroom). Which software you use for developing your photos?
Simlarly the black on the beak has lost details. You can try to recover that during post processing.

On the composition front I find the head too close to the top frame. Some more space at the top would have been good. Was there a bird on top?

Look forward to more images.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Nitin Tawde]

Thanks for your valuable tips. I use CS3, but yet learning. not very good at it really. I try to pay more attention while clicking. Your tips are encoraging. This was my first post on site. I will definitely continue.