Snowy Egret leaving wakes
Santa Ana River, Orange, California, USA
Olympus E-M5 II, M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm F4.8-6.7 II
Nice shot! I saw snowies in Florida do this. I’ve read that they do it to attract fish to the surface.
My Panasonic TZ100 will take burst video and I can extract a chosen frame at 8 mp... which with AI can be smooth and noise free, then pixel enlarged with Megapixel. Were you just lucky to grab your great, of the moment, shot and/or does you Olympus have that video burst capability? How did you get this snapshot*.
*Snapshot meaning moment in time.
dpullum: My Oly has several Sequential modes, and I was using Sequential High with mechanical shutter, which can take up to 10 frames per second until it fills the buffer, then about 5-6 frames per second sustained. (I recently upgraded my memory card to the fastest I could get, and it doubled the sustained rate.)
I followed this bird for 13 seconds as it came in to land, and I see I took 5 bursts of 10 to 19 shots each. The downside of the High mode is that it autofocuses only on the first shot of a burst and then keeps that focus as long as you keep shooting. (Sequential Low mode refocuses each shot, but can only capture 5 fps.) Since the bird was coming toward me, it would eventually get out of focus. So I let up on the shutter button every 3-4 seconds, pressed it again and the camera reacquired focus... most of the time.
This shot happened to be in the last burst, shot 3 out of 19, at about 50 feet away. At that distance, sometimes I led the bird and sometimes I trailed it - keeping centered is hard! Shutter speed was 1/3200, f/6.3 for a Depth of Field of about 1 meter. Autofocus locked in on the tail.
So I guess you could say it was a lucky shot but I set it up so I should get a few lucky ones. This was the only shot with those nice wakes. I liked the smooth water, so I did post-process out a few specks to make it even smoother.
Wow, that's one I would print and hang for sure
Umnak
Loc: Mount Vernon, Wa.
Fantastic image, well done!
Rob
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