The Great Blue Heron is an incredible bird. Whenever I see one, I always try to get a picture of it. The problem has always been that I could not get close enough to get a good shot. In the final picture, the bird would almost look like a small speck. You would just have to take my word for it that there was a bird in the frame.
During my recent trip to St. George Island, one of my goals was to photograph birds – gulls, pelicans, and, of course, Great Blue Herons. I was somewhat surprised and a little disappointed when, for the first couple of days, I saw very few birds. Thinking it was probably just the time of year I was there, I resigned myself to the idea that perhaps my plans to photograph the birds would have to wait for another time.
But, on the third day of our trip, everything came together. My wife and I were taking our dog for his regularly scheduled, or perhaps I should say regularly demanded, post-lunch walk on the beach. As was my recently acquired practice, I slung my camera over my shoulder and headed out. In the middle of the day, I wasn’t really expecting to photograph anything, but, hey, better safe than sorry! About a half mile down the beach, I noticed some seashells and decided to grab a couple of shots of them.
Just as I was about to stand and continue on our walk, I looked up to see an amazing sight – a Great Blue Heron slowly walking toward me. I quickly brought my camera up, focused, and began shooting.
In the past, I would never have been able to get closer than about 50 feet from the bird. If I got any closer, it would have either walked or flown away. But, this bird seemed to have no fear. It kept getting closer and closer. I kept shooting and shooting. Amazingly, it came to within 10 to 15 feet of my position and just stood there.
I glanced at the picture preview on the back of the camera and realized the lens I had, a 24-70mm, just wasn’t working for this situation. I had just the lens I needed for what I wanted to capture. Only, it was a sitting in my camera pack a half-mile and at least ten minutes away. When it was all said and done, it would take close to 30 minutes round trip to change the lens and get back to the location, and I knew there was no way that bird was going to stay in that spot for that long. Absolutely no way!
But, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity. I slowly backed away until I was 25 to 30 feet away from the bird. Then, I turned and double-timed it back to our house to switch lenses. I would occasionally look back and see the bird was still standing exactly where he had been when I left. He literally had not moved.
Reaching the house, I quickly changed to my 100-400mm lens. For added measure, I added a 1.4x teleconverter, which turned the lens into a 140-560mm lens. Perfect! Grabbing my tripod on the way out, I headed back toward my heron a half-mile away.
Approaching the location, I was shocked to find that not only had the bird not flown away but it had not moved at all. It was standing in the same spot and in the same position as when I had left. A man who had been fishing nearby the whole time looked at me and said “That bird hasn’t moved an inch since you left.”
Not wanting to alarm the bird, I set up my tripod about 30 feet away, and began taking pictures. I did this for about five minutes when I looked up to see my wife and dog approaching. My dog, in his “I want to chase something” mood, saw the bird and began lunging and barking at it. I knew my time was done.
Opening the file on my computer, I realized that the heron blended too much into the background and didn’t really stand out. Bringing the image into Photoshop, I selected the bird by using the menu command “Select Subject.” This did a pretty good job of selecting just the bird. Using the lasso tool, I refined the selection to ensure only the bird, and not any of the background, was selected. Opening the “Levels” dialog box, I increased the exposure and brightness of the bird. I went back to the menu and clicked on “Select – Inverse” to select the entire background. Again, I opened the “Levels” dialog box and decreased the exposure and brightness of the background. These adjustments separated the bird from the background.
When I originally shot this picture, I used a horizontal orientation because I wanted to give a sense of the bird looking into the frame. However, I realized that the horizontal orientation didn’t work for two reasons. First, all the empty space on the right side of the frame overpowered and minimized the main subject, which was the bird. Second, the horizontal shot diminished the size and stature of the Great Blue Heron. These birds are big. This one easily stood even with the top of my chest. A horizontal orientation just did not do justice to the size of this great bird. To address these issues, I used the Crop tool to crop the image into the vertical orientation seen here.
Finally, you may be wondering why the bird stood in that one spot for so long. Well, come to find out, the man who was fishing that day had also been out fishing the day before, as well. When he caught a fish he deemed too small, he would toss it to the heron. The heron quickly decided that this was a good man and would stand there waiting to be fed. In the immortal words of the late Paul Harvey, now you know the rest of the story.
Settings: 328mm, 1/500 sec, f/11, 160 ISO
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