RATE MY PHOTO
This month’s image is by Peggy Flory-Dean, who is just getting into wildlife photography with her 600mm lens
Peggy says I shot this cormorant from an airboat in the Florida Everglades. I used a Canon 600mm f/4 lens, mounted on a Gitzo tripod and gimbal head. The exposure was 1/1,000 sec at f/4 and ISO 160.
Chris says Capturing wildlife in action is one of the most challenging subjects any photographer can take on. Add strong backlighting and a dark background, and you have a recipe for disappointing images. But you have managed to overcome all of these hurdles to produce a stunning shot.
First of all, the timing of the shot is perfect. The bird’s wings are fully extended upwards, and there is plenty of backlit spray being kicked up by the cormorant, creating an extremely dynamic image.
With such a dark background, it would have also been easy to overexpose this image and lose detail in the backlit spray, but you have done a good job of avoiding this. The shot looks quite dark, but there is just enough detail in both the cormorant and the water, so this exposure has worked well.
When it comes to the composition, there is a little too much dead space on the right of the picture, and not much space for the subject to move into on the left. So I would suggest cropping a little from the right and bottom of the shot. This would also move the brightest area of the spray away from the centre of the frame, which would give an even more balanced result.