Mad Heron

I left Bozeman this morning, actually about 15 hours ago. I had planned to take my picture for today of the sunrise on the plane, but that didn't exactly turn out. The sunrise was amazing, but I was in the isle seat, and I was asleep. I only briefly awoke to see the most amazing pink sunrise, pretty sure I thought it was a dream actually.

Now I'm in Boulder, CO, staying at my aunts house for the next few days. The first thing I got to do when I arrived was go for a bike ride! Pretty happy about that! There are some walking/bike trails basically right from where they live, so I just hopped on those and started riding. After a little bit, I arrived at a small pond. The trail went around the pond, and when I got to the far side of it I saw a picture I had to take.

There was a single heron or some fishing bird standing in the shallow water. The sun was coming from behind it, and the water was just lit up golden all around. I didn't have my camera on me at the time, so I rode back to the house as fast as I could, and then rode back out hoping the bird would still be there.

And it was!

I shot that bird for about a half an hour or so, all through the changing light of sunset and into blue hour a bit. My favorite shot was taken just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, so I'll explain that one for the blog.

For a photo like this, you have three options for exposure. You can expose for the water, and make a silhouette of the bird. You can exposure for the bird and then blow out the water. You can bracket and combine the two exposures to make a HDR photo where everything is exposed correctly.  While HDR might be cool, I chose to just keep it simple and do a silhouette of the bird.

Metering off the water wasn't that tricky, I did over expose by about 1/3 stop, just to keep the water nice and bright. Normally, water with reflections of the sky is a bit lighter than middle grey, so just using what your camera tells you will actually underexpose the water.

I settled on f/5.6, ISO100, and 1/200. There wasn't a lot of light to work with at this point, so I shot wide open to try to keep a high enough shutter speed. I could have pushed the ISO a bit more, but I felt like 1/200 was enough to freeze the slow moving bird.

Composing this, I wanted until the bird was moving, then tried to catch it while the foot was just above the water. This gave a more dynamic pose, especially with all the ripples in the water.

Editing was a little tricky. I wanted the water to be like liquid silver, or in other words very smooth and silky.

Okay, lot to talk about here.

The original image was well exposed, but it was rather flat and colorless. To fix this, I brightened things up to make the whites really pop out. Contrast and clarity also helped with this. The idea was to gave a lot of contrast to the scene. However, this crushed the shadows too much, so I pulled more detail back into them.

But now there was too much detail in the silhouette, so I used an adjustment brush to darken that up a bit and return it to a almost black silhouette. The whites and blacks sliders used with the option key to set the black and whites points were very helpful. It really allowed be to push the photo to the farthest points of contrast with out loosing detail or information.

Now to deal with color. Up the vibrance, which helped a lot. I also warmed up the image substantially to give it more of that golden hour look.

I also went in and adjust the oranges to be more red. Again, this gives the photo a more golden look and feel.

So here's a before...

And after...

Quite a change, eh? I feel that the photo is more true to what I was seeing with my eyes. Cameras compress contrast and colors, which kinda sucks for scenes like this. It's up to editing to really bring back those qualities of a photo, and make it look as the photographer saw the image.

See you tomorrow!