Black Crowned Night Heron

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This morning after meeting some friends for breakfast, I was watching some birds along the shoreline of an adjacent lake. I noticed a white ibis and a black crowned
night heron fishing along the shoreline, but was particularly interested in the heron. I had my camera in the car, but the longest lens I had with me was a 70-200 f2.8. I had never used this lens with an extender but since it was the only solution available, I tried some shots first with the 1.4x and then later with the 2x extender. All photos in this blog entry were shot with the 2x extender.

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I was fortunate under these circumstances to capture a few decent images, although I blurred a few of them due to a combination of shooting at slow shutter speeds, and being crouched down in an unstable shooting position, trying to get down as close to the water level as possible. As always, it's best not to use an extender if you don't need to, but I found that the results were acceptable with both the extenders and the 70-200. It did seem to work a little harder to acquire focus with the 2x, however. Below are a few more photos from this morning.

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I tried shooting both with a flash and without, because I feared that the flash may cause a bad red eye situation due to the distance from the bird, since it was mounted directly on the camera as opposed to using a flash bracket. But it only caused a problem in a couple of the photos.

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Using the flash was probably the best approach because it allowed me to expose for the background, which had some bright reflections in the middle of dark water, and then use the flash to put some light on the bird.

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My goal with flash photography is to make it subtle enough so that it is not obvious to the viewer that flash was used. The horizontal lines you see on the bird in several of these photos are reflections from ripples in the water. All in all, this turned out to be a fun way to spend a couple hours in an unplanned, unexpected opportunity.